Thiotimoline and the Vote

(This article first appeared in the January/February 2007 issue of the
Journal of Applied Chronochemistry. It is reproduced here by
permission.)

In the wake of the disputed presidential election of 2000, and
similarly disputed elections for Georgia's US Senate seat in 2002 and
the Ohio presidential vote in 2004, a great deal of attention has been
focused on electronic voting machines. Reformers fear that the voting
machines can be (and have been) hacked into online, and altered
software uploaded to allow vote totals to be skewed -- the electronic
equivalent of ballot box stuffing. Of particular concern has been the
spread of voting machines that leave no written record of votes cast,
no "paper trail", to use the current terminology, that would allow
votes to be re-counted by hand. The potential harm cannot be
exaggerated, since democracy itself would be threatened if voters'
choices could be electronically subverted. Fortunately, the solution
to the problem of electronic vote tampering is at hand, and can be
summed up in one word: thiotimoline.

Thiotimoline is an organic chemical compound whose most unusual
feature is its ability to dissolve in water up to 1.12 seconds before
the water has been added. Thiotimoline, which is derived from the
bark of the Rosacea Karlsbadensis rufo, or cavern rose plant, was
first brought to the attention of the scientific world in 1948, when
Isaac Asimov's now-classic paper "The Endochronic Properties of
Resublimated Thiotimoline" was first published in the March issue of
the Journal of Astounding Science Fiction. In subsequent years, the
science of chronochemistry has grown by leaps and bounds as new
applications of thiotimoline's endochronic properties have developed.

Researchers at the Institute for the Study and Advancement of Applied
Chronochemistry (ISAAC) were contacted in the wake of the 2004
election by Mr. Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., and tasked with developing a
remedy for the problem of insecure electronic vote tabulation
technology. A study group was formed under the direction of Dr.
Esteban Almirante, and the problem was attacked from a variety of
angles. We will skip over the next three years, with its tale of
unworkable solutions and scientific dead ends (the details of which
can be found in Dr. Almirante's heartbreaking series of papers in the
Journal of Applied Chronochemistry). In the end, the Almirante Group
was able to solve the problem of electronic election fraud.

The basic problem is one of numbers. There are currently over 180,000
voting precincts within the United States, each of which is the site
of one or more voting machines. Most fraudulent voting takes place
within a small number of machines located at strategic polling
locations. Unfortunately, there is, in the normal course of events,
no way of knowing ahead of time which machines in which precincts will
produce questionable vote totals. This is where thiotimoline comes
in.

In 1954 the team of McLaren and Michie at the University of Edinburgh
developed the telechronic battery, which makes use of an
interconnected series of endochronometers to extend the temporal reach
of the endochronic reaction (details on the telechronic battery can be
found in the October 1960 issue of Analog: the Journal of Science Fact
and Science Fiction in a paper entitled "Thiotimoline and the Space
Age"). In the decades since McLaren and Michie's pioneering work,
telechronic batteries have been developed that are capable of
interacting with events up to four weeks in the future.

The Almirante Group has determined that a central location can be
established with an alphanumerically equipped telechronic battery.
After polls have closed and the final vote tabulations have been
announced, the telechronic battery can be programed to send a message
four weeks into the past listing every voting machine involved in a
disputed election. At that time, four weeks before the elections,
legal teams can be dispatched to each of the affected localities, in
order to file legal challenges based upon the future election
disputes. The legal teams will use the future disputed election to
petition for the replacement of suspect voting machines with machines
producing verifiable vote totals. Due to the precedent established in
the 2006 legal case of Institute for the Study and Advancement of
Applied Chronochemistry v. the City of Fresno (a case filed by ISAAC
for the specific purpose of producing such a legal precedent), all
such endochronically-based challenges must result in the replacement
of suspect voting machines.

A trial run of the Almirante Solution will be conducted in the
upcoming gubernatorial elections in Louisiana and Kentucky, and any
unforeseen problems can be addressed before the 2008 elections. (It
may even be possible to use telechronic messaging to address the
problems before the 2007 elections.) If the trial run is successful,
we can be assured that the 2008 elections will be the first national
elections in American history to be endochronically-guaranteed free of
electoral fraud.

The threat to our nation's democratic institutions will be eliminated,
and American democracy will be a model and inspiration the world over.
--
Johnny Pez
Newport, Rhode Island
October 2007