I'm sitting in a hotel tonight with not much else to watch but the election coverage. I was one of the lucky ones that got out early this morning and only had to wait about 15 minutes to cast my vote and then it was off to the airport to visit one of my clients. While waiting for the flight naturally all the news stations in the airport were talking about the election process. Some were asking people what they liked and disliked about the process and what they would like to see changed. I for one think that there is a place for electronic voting. Clearly there are some bugs to work out but I'm sure there are some very simple solutions that will get us started.
And of course no election day would be complete without recalling one of my favorite election stories, one that occured exactly 56 years ago today and one in which technology played a big part...
In summer 1952, a Remington Rand executive approached CBS News chief Sig Mickelson and said the Univac might be able to plot early election-night returns against past voting patterns and spit out a predicted winner. Mickelson and anchor Walter Cronkite thought the claim was a load of baloney but figured it would at least be entertaining to try it on the air.
Eckert and Mauchly sought help from a University of Pennsylvania statistician, Max Woodbury. He and Mauchly wrote one of the first algorithms for computing, working at Mauchly's house because Mauchly had been blacklisted as pro-communist. "John wasn't allowed into the company anymore," says Mauchly's widow, Kay Mauchly Antonelli.
On election night, the 16,000-pound Univac remained at its home in Philadelphia. In the TV studio, CBS set up a fake computer - a panel embedded with blinking Christmas lights and a teletype machine. Cronkite sat next to it. Correspondent Charles Collingwood and a camera crew set up in front of the real Univac.
As polls began to close, clerks typed the data into the Univac using three Unityper machines, which punched holes in a paper tape that would be fed into the computer.
By 8:30 p.m. ET - long before news organizations of the era knew national election outcomes - Univac spit out a startling prediction. It said Eisenhower would get 438 electoral votes to Stevenson's 93 - a landslide victory. Because every poll had said the race would be tight, CBS didn't believe the computer and refused to air the prediction.
"Mauchly was at home getting telephone calls all the time about what was happening," Antonelli says. "All he could say was, 'Sit tight, we've done the best we could.' We sat there all night in front of the TV set with bated breath."
"It was essentially a live demo, on national TV," says Jim Senior, historian at Unisys, the computer giant that traces its roots to Remington Rand and Univac. "That took a lot of daring."
Under pressure, Woodbury rejiggered the algorithms. Univac then gave Eisenhower 8-to-7 odds over Stevenson. At 9:15 p.m., Cronkite reported that on the air. But Woodbury kept working and found he'd made a mistake. He ran the numbers again and got the original results - an Eisenhower landslide.
Late that night, as actual results came in, CBS realized Univac had been right. Embarrassed, Collingwood came back on the air and confessed to millions of viewers that Univac had predicted the results hours earlier.
In fact, the official count ended up being 442 electoral votes for Eisenhower and 89 for Stevenson. Univac had been off by less than 1%. It had missed the popular vote results by only 3%. Considering that the Univac had 5,000 vacuum tubes that did 1,000 calculations per second, that's pretty impressive. A musical Hallmark card has more computing power.
The public latched onto the Univac's performance. In 1952, people were as intrigued by computers as we are by SpaceShipOne. Stories ran on newspaper front pages. "Univac" suddenly became a generic term for those blinking electric brains.