Is There A 3D-Printed Concrete House In Your Future?

 

In a recent issue of The New Yorker, reporter Rachel Monroe describes the efforts of an Austin entrepreneur named Jason Ballard to revolutionize the construction industry the way the electronics business has been revolutionized by the introduction of integrated circuits. 

 

In some ways, the analogy is appealing.  Probably the most complicated consumer-electronics item in the early 1960s was a television set.  You can find online videos showing how TV sets were made back then:  dozens of women (the assemblers were almost always women) hand-wired chassis with individual components, one part at a time.  While there are probably some hand-assembly steps in the production of iPads or laptops today, virtually all the "wiring" happens without any human intervention in a series of automated photographic and chemical processes.  That is a big reason why your smartphone doesn't cost ten million dollars and doesn't have to be rolled around on a cart.

 

Ballard hopes to apply the technology of 3D printing to houses.  He has developed a special kind of concrete that stays in place when it's squirted out of a precisely positioned nozzle at the end of a giant 3D printing frame that builds up each wall of a house layer by layer, the same way smaller 3D-printed structures are made. 

 

So far, except for the manufactured-housing market, the residential construction industry in the U. S. has been stubbornly resistant to automation efforts.  Most houses built today are done the old-fashioned way:  grading the site, laying the foundation, erecting the frame, closing it in, and doing the wiring and plumbing and interior finish work.  All these are labor-intensive manual operations, which means labor costs are a good fraction of the total cost of new housing.  Which is why Ballard has high hopes for lowering the cost of housing worldwide with his 3D-printing idea. 

 

Housing is one of the three legs on the stool of humankind's material necessities:  food, clothing, and shelter.  So anything that promises to make better or cheaper housing is worth looking into.  However, there are reasons to believe that Ballard's company may not achieve all that he's hoping it will.

 

One reason is the regulatory environment.  As Monroe points out, building codes are highly localized, and what is legal in one locality may be otherwise elsewhere.  I think it's significant that Ballard set up shop in Texas, which is one of the most union-unfriendly states in the Union.  I can easily picture picket lines forming around any attempt to erect a 3D-printed house in, say, New Jersey, where construction unions are part of the landscape. 

 

Another is history.  Speaking of New Jersey, that state harbors several all-concrete-construction houses built by none other than Thomas Edison.  As kind of a sideline to his unsuccessful iron-ore business, in 1899 Edison founded the Edison Portland Cement Company and started to manufacture cement.  To increase sales, he began experimenting with the idea of an all-concrete house made with complicated molds.  He filed patents on his ideas and attracted the attention of a philanthropist named Henry Phipps Jr., who hoped to solve New York City's housing crisis with Edison-designed houses.

 

The farthest Edison's experiments in concrete living got were the construction of a few two-story concrete bungalows in New Jersey, with a few more in Indiana.  The New Jersey houses are still occupied and in reasonably good shape. 

 

The problem was not in the quality of the resulting house, but in the complex molds needed to form an entire house in one pour.  After trying a few test houses, Edison realized there was no way to mass-produce houses with the ridiculously intricate molds he needed.  So Edison's concrete houses stand today, a mute testimony to yet another great idea that had an unfortunate encounter with reality.

 

It's an open question whether Ballard's automated 3D-printing approach will cheapen the cost of housing enough to be attractive to a wide range of customers.  Monroe points out that it's most likely to be used in places where labor is extremely scarce, such as the moon.  If we ever establish a space colony on the moon or other planets, it will be cheaper by far to send up a bunch of machinery that will build housing rather than getting the members of Local 310 of the New Jersey Carpenters' Union to the moon safely and back. 

 

But the moon is not Ballard's only goal, although he has been in discussions with NASA about extraterrestrial construction.  He hopes that the combination of cheaper construction and the new possibilities that 3D-printed construction opens up—it's just as cheap to print a curved wall as a straight wall, for example—will make his method the next big thing in construction.

 

Edison's experience may be instructive, in that he, as well as Ballard, tried to substitute a one-time capital expenditure (molds in Edison's case, the 3D printing machine in Ballard's case) for ongoing labor expenses.  Sometimes this works, but sometimes it doesn't.  The basic structure of a house is only part of the total construction costs.  Trim features such as walls and doors, wiring and plumbing, and interior finishes (not everybody will like the coarse-stucco effect that results from the unvarnished 3D-printing process) are still hand-labor items, and no mention is made in the article about how the roof is dealt with.  Icon, Ballard's company, shows example houses on its website, and they appear to have conventional metal roofs, not poured-concrete roofs. 

So it begins to look like 3D printing may find a few niche markets where labor costs are high or peculiar construction requirements make that technique advantageous. But as for taking over the entire construction industry, I don't think the union carpenters in New Jersey, or anywhere else, should be shaking in their workboots for fear Icon will take away their jobs.

 

I wish Ballard well, and perhaps he can overcome the problems that Edison faced and revolutionize the way we build houses.  But he may stand a better chance in places where building codes and unions haven't shown up yet, and the moon certainly qualifies.

 

Sources:  Rachel Monroe's article "Build Better" appeared on pp. 24-29 of the Jan. 23, 2023 issue of The New Yorker. The story of Edison's concrete houses is told well at https://www.amusingplanet.com/2019/06/thomas-edisons-forgotten-passion.html.  Icon's website is https://www.iconbuild.com/.

Electrifying New York — Again

 

Thomas Edison famously electrified New York City in 1882 when the first commercial central power plant in the world went online at 255-257 Pearl Street.  It took most of the next three decades to spread the blessings of electric power through the rest of the city, but it got done without much help from any government.  Electric lights were cheaper, safer, and just better than gaslight or kerosene lamps, and little government intervention was required to persuade millions of New Yorkers that going electric was the thing to do.

 

New York City now faces a new kind of electrification:  the electric car.  As an article in the New York Times recently described, the futuristic vision of having only all-electric vehicles inside the confines of the five boroughs that make up New York is being realized slowly, if at all. 

 

One significant drawback is the lack of public charging stations.  Even after setting a modest goal of installing 120 new charging stations, the city ended up as #93 in a recent survey that rated 100 cities in terms of how electric-car-friendly they were.

 

New York City's commissioner of transportation Hank Gutman is determined to change the situation.  His commission issued a report calling for 1,000 curbside chargers by 2025 and 10,000 by 2030.  Every municipal parking lot will have one-fifth of its slots equipped with chargers, if the plans in the report are carried out.

 

One might ask if those slots will be reserved for electric cars only, of which there are presently only 20,000 registered in all of New York City.  If only electric cars can park in those slots, all this means for the old-fashioned gas-guzzler driver is that the municipal parking lots will effectively shrink by 20%.

 

The electric car is perhaps one of the few major mass-market items whose main selling point is ideological.  From a purely pragmatic individual point of view—whether you are looking at personal safety, saving money, or convenience—there is really nothing an all-electric car can offer that a gasoline model can't also offer.

 

The ideological reason to buy an all-electric car is that it is one small step for a car buyer, but multiply that by a billion or so and it will be a giant leap toward a fossil-fuel-less future in which global warming is defeated.  And this reason cannot be discounted, because I think it is one of the main reasons people currently buy electric vehicles.

 

Whether it makes sense for someone to spend an extra ten to thirty thousand dollars on a car that requires careful logistical planning to make it between charging stations and may not in fact reduce carbon emissions at all if the local electric utility burns coal, is a decision that individuals are free to make.  But so far, despite the growing sales figures of upstarts such as Tesla, the prospect of gasoline vehicles going the way of kerosene lamps by 1910 actually looks pretty reasonable, if you give it another three or four decades.

 

In 1910, there were still lots of people who used kerosene lamps, and it would be another twenty or thirty years before such things were found only in extremely rural areas.  And it would take government intervention, in the form of the Rural Electrification Administration, to bring electricity to the remaining rural areas without electric power.  Still, nobody was forced to put away their kerosene lamps and get connected.  People in rural areas had to wait longer because it cost more to install the lines than in urban areas, but they still wanted electricity as much as their city cousins did.

 

Until all-electric vehicles are cheaper and easier to buy and operate than gasoline-powered ones, it will be like pushing on a string to get most people to buy one.  Some of the string moves when you push on it, but most of it doesn't.  There are those who feel that the chronic global-warming emergency is so urgent that fossil fuels should be effectively banned—taxed out of existence or otherwise made inaccessible to the average person.  This would represent a draconian market intervention by governments in an area where government has not exactly covered itself with glory, judging by similar historical interventions such as the price controls during the gasoline crisis of the 1970s.

 

The technological optimists among us (and on some days I count myself in that number) look to a day when some new and currently unthought-of technology improves battery storage capacity by another factor of 10 and lowers the price by the same factor.  If that happened, electric cars would simply out-perform and undercut the price of gasoline vehicles, which hold the record as being the most complicated mass-produced human-sized object in history. 

 

By contrast, the entire drive train of an electric car is a battery, some electronics, and electric motors hooked to the wheels.  The rest is software, and we all know how cheap software is.  I don't think we'll get to the point that companies will give away electric cars for free as long as you put up with the ads, but it might come close.

 

At that point, we won't need government subsidies or carbon taxes or prohibitions to make the transition from gas to electric vehicles.  People will want to do it of their own free will, and the market will be more than happy to oblige.  But it might not happen for a while yet.

 

One of the most scarce commodities these days is patience.  Even with the vastly superior performance of electric lighting, which was not cheaper than gas to begin with, it took the better part of four decades before most people were able to make the transition.  Heavy-breathing global-warming alarmists may say, "We don't have four decades! We've got to do something now!!"  We are just emerging from the results of two years of governments "doing something now" to fight COVID-19, and offhand I can think of only one of those things that had an unequivocally positive effect on the outcome:  the rapid development of vaccines.  Most other actions arguably did more harm than good, or at least mixed in a lot of harm with the good. 

 

Let's not make that mistake again.

 

Sources:  Ginia Bellafante's article "New York's Electric Car Future Faces Several Challenges" appeared in the Mar. 13, 2022 edition of the New York Times.

The Ethics of Anti-Squirrel Bird Feeders

Today is Easter, and in keeping with the tone of that holiday, I thought I'd look at something a little lighter for a change:  the ethics of squirrel-preventing bird feeders.

First, we identify the cast of characters.  There's the people who like to provide food for birds, in exchange for getting to watch the birds feed.  Next, there's the birds, who don't really have a downside in this deal, except when the squirrels get into the act and make less food available for the birds.  Third, there are the squirrels, who have to eat too, and are not to blame for the fact that watching them eat is a lot less interesting to people than watching birds eat.  And fourth, there are the companies and individuals who make bird feeders and exercise their ingenuity to make sure birds get the seed and squirrels don't. 

Maybe you haven't given the slightest thought in your adult life to birds or bird feeders.  But believe me, folks have been trying to come up with ways to stop squirrels from filching from bird feeders for decades, if not centuries.  A physics professor named Rhett Allain who blogs on the Wired website about physics in ordinary life came across a particularly clever technique.  It's a feeder put out by a company called Droll Yankees.  For the most part, it looks like an ordinary transparent-plastic-tube bird feeder, with openings for the birdseed at the bottom and a round wire perch below that for the birds to sit on as they eat—that is, birds who don't weigh as much as your average squirrel.  Because when a squirrel exercises his athletic prowess to climb down the rope that the feeder hangs on and puts his weight on the perch to get in position for a meal, the increased downward force on the perch flips a switch that goes to a battery-powered motor.  And all of a sudden, the squirrel finds himself on a merry-go-round like the one that goes out of control at the end of Hitchcock's "Strangers On a Train." 

For the animal-rights fans among their customer base, the Droll Yankees say their contraption "gently spins squirrels off the perch."  Allain found a clip taken by a satisfied customer of an unusually persistent squirrel, though, and you can view it here to judge whether the word "gently" is appropriate.  I don't think the squirrel suffered any permanent damage, but he probably had a bad case of vertigo for a while.

I have had my own problems with birdseed-thieving squirrels.  Years ago, while we were living in New England, I had my own idea about how to fix the problem.  We bought the same general kind of plastic-tube feeder that Droll Yankees sells, and hung outside our kitchen window.  This one had openings at a couple of levels, and little aluminum rods sticking out beneath the openings for birds to perch on.  Well, the space between the upper and lower rods was just enough for a squirrel to grab onto with his front legs on the upper one and his back legs on the lower one while he stuffed his face with illicit birdfood. 

We tried the usual passive things first.  A conical metal hat kind of thing hung onto the rope above the feeder was supposed to make the squirrel slide off, but he managed to swing inward while falling and catch onto the feeder anyway. 

Looking at those rods one day, I had a thought.  Being an electrical engineer, my thoughts naturally ran along electrical directions, and I recalled how one of Thomas Edison's first (non-patented) inventions was inspired by a roach-infested telegraph office he worked in.  Availing himself of the 150 volts or so that was used to energize long telegraph lines, he rigged up a pair of copper patches along a favorite roach pathway and awaited results.  Sure enough, once the roach completed the circuit, his career was at an end.

I had no desire for fried squirrel meat, so I dug around in the basement until I found a couple of transformers left over from the time a previous owner had installed the only innovative things Ma Bell ever did for consumers in the 1960s:  Princess telephones.  The phones had a little pilot light that ran off a low-power transformer that you plugged in the wall, and though the telephones themselves were long gone, the transformers were still there in the basement. 

The secondary voltage was only 6 volts AC or so, and by running this low-voltage power from one transformer out through a pushbutton switch by the kitchen window and over to the tree and onto the bird feeder, I was not endangering the house with high-voltage wiring.  But on top of the feeder, I placed the second transformer to step the voltage back up to 120, and ran one wire to each of the two poles.  You see the trend of my thoughts now.  The current was only a few milliamps, not enough to damage the squirrel, but enough to get his attention.

This was in the days before cellphone cameras (or cellphones, for that matter), but it brought a glow to my wicked heart to watch the squirrel clamber down along the rope, slide past the cone, and position himself for a nice repast, only to get the surprise of his life when I pushed the button.  He decided it was time to leave, and not by climbing up the rope either. 

The drawback of this system, of course, was that you had to stand at the window and guard the feeder, or else the squirrels would just come back when you weren't watching.  Squirrels don't take to training very well, and so while my system had great entertainment value, it didn't cut down much on the loss of birdseed to squirrels.

I'm out of space, so I will leave you, gentle reader, to ponder the ethical implications of favoring one member of the animal species while tormenting another one with centrifugal force or high voltage.  Here in Texas, we've switched to hummingbird feeders.  The squirrels aren't interested in them.

Sources:  Rhett Allain's article on the DrollYankee centrifugal squirrel-preventing bird feeder (only $200, I might add) can be found on the Wired website at https://www.wired.com/story/how-to-whirl-a-squirrel-off-a-bird-feeder/.  The video of the persistent squirrel is at

https://twitter.com/hood_naturalist/status/1247356168139345920?s=20

and the Droll Yankees feeder itself can be viewed at http://drollyankees.com/product/yankee-flipper-bird-feeder/.  A good description of the climactic merry-go-round scene in Strangers On a Train can be read at https://rear-view-mirror.com/2019/05/08/cinemas-greatest-scenes-alfred-hitchcocks-merry-go-round-from-hell/.

Moral Exemplars Still Wanted: "The Current War: Director's Cut"

One way of teaching engineering ethics that is less grim than picking through wreckages of failed projects is to portray moral exemplars:  engineers who did the right thing in a critical situation and benefited people thereby.  For example, William LeMessurier, a structural consulting engineer, played a prominent role in determining that the 60-story Boston skyscraper formerly known as the John Hancock Tower was unstable in certain types of wind loading.  The analysis he and his colleagues produced convinced the owners to install millions of dollars' worth of cross-bracing, and the building is still standing today. 

For many generations both in the U. S. and abroad, Thomas Edison was a heroic inventor whose ideas benefited millions.  In 1940, at the height of the inventor-as-hero period in U. S. history, MGM brought out a pair of panegyrics based on his life: "Young Tom Edison" starring Mickey Rooney, and "Edison the Man" with Spencer Tracy.  I must confess that seeing the the former film on TV played a disproportionately large role in my decision to become an electrical engineer, around the age of eight.

However, cinematic heroes today tend to be mainly of the comic-book variety, so when "The Current War:  Director's Cut" was finally released after a two-year delay connected with the fall of Harvey Weinstein, whose production company financed the film, I could hardly wait to see what a present-day director and actors would do with the raw material.

And some of it is pretty raw.  There was no hint in the MGM flicks that Edison was ever anything less than selfless as he enthusiastically searched for innovations that would be boons for humanity.  In particular, there was nothing about the admittedly sordid tricks he pulled to make George Westinghouse's rival AC system look like a threat to public safety, up to and including killing horses and pigs (but not an elephant, as was falsely attributed to him by some confused reports of an elephant's electrocution he filmed at Coney Island in 1903).  But in "The Current War," Benedict Cumberbatch's Edison is no one's idea of a moral exemplar, though he would qualify as perhaps an object of pity.

Just the kind of historic rabbit-trail I took you on about the elephant is one of the problems with the film.  Despite the director's thoughtful inclusion of little side-titles when new characters are introduced (I particularly liked "Nikola Tesla, futurist"), the people I saw the film with all complained that it was very hard to follow.  Although I have made somewhat of an amateur study of Edison, Westinghouse, and that era of the history of technology, I myself had trouble figuring out who was who unless the side-titles were there to help.  In particular, there was an older bewhiskered gent who seemed to be Westinghouse's technical Svengali, but who was only addressed as "Frank."  At the time I guessed it was Frank Sprague, who played a prominent role in early electric tramways.  But later in the film it turned out he was Franklin Pope, an "electrician" (which was what electrical specialists sometimes called themselves back then) who died, not trying to get Westinghouse's electric fan motor to work as the film implied, but in trying to fix a motor-generator installed in the home of his own basement.

As most historical films have to do, this one takes dramatic license with the facts, but stays reasonably close to the main narrative, which is the battle between Edison's first-to-the-market but ultimately unsuccessful DC system, and Westinghouse's cheaper and better alternative of AC, which is still with us today.  The climax of the MGM Spencer Tracy flick, which was Edison's invention of the light bulb, is relegated to a long speech by Cumberbatch at the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago.  Westinghouse won the bid to light up the fair, and that triumph symbolized the end of the current war.  Westinghouse and Edison run into each other at the Japanese exhibit, and Westinghouse asks Edison what it felt like to invent the light bulb.  What ensues is perhaps the best piece of classical acting I've seen Cumberbatch do—no special effects, no superhero action, just a man painting a picture of a scene with words that answers the question better than any number of adjectives. 

Cumberbatch seems to be making a career of portraying emotionally peculiar geniuses:  first as the legendary Sherlock Holmes, then as the eccentric mathematician and code expert Alan Turing, and now as Edison.  Critics of the film say he does a good job of portraying our era's idea of the corporate genius:  the Steve-Jobs-type disrupter of the status quo who nevertheless betrays his usually-suppressed emotional life by playing back the voice of his dead wife on his new invention, the phonograph.  Edison's first wife Mary did die in the midst of the current war, which only added to his distress and frustration.  But he didn't let her death slow him down in pursuing his goals by whatever means he thought necessary, including secretly cooperating with a man who thought electrocution would be better than hanging condemned criminals.

I suppose I should have put a spoiler alert on that last paragraph.  But it's unlikely that too many people will see the movie just for the suspense.  To techno-nerds such as myself, who are familiar with many of Edison's lesser-known inventions, the film was a feast of seeing cinematic reproductions of things like the first kinetograph projector (an early form of motion-picture machine) and his electric pen for writing on paper for mimeograph reproduction.  And the film gets some humor out of the Edison family's alleged habit of secretly communicating with each other via Morse-code taps. 

But for the average viewer who has little or no prior knowledge of the era, I'm afraid the film will be a rather confused mish-mosh of mysterious devices, obscure motives, and hard-to-identify characters. A strength of the film is that everything takes place against a lovingly-reproduced CGI background of 1890s America, including a panoramic view of the Columbian Exposition, complete with the original Ferris wheel, that ought to be issued as a two-by-three-foot poster on its own.  I'm not sure what effect the movie will have on eight-year-olds, but don't look for there to be a flurry of young people flocking to be electrical engineers in about ten years.  Actors, maybe, but not engineers.

Sources:  "The Current War:  Director's Cut" was released on October 24, 2019, and stars Benedict Cumberbatch as Thomas Edison.  I referred to a review of the film posted at https://www.thewrap.com/the-current-war-directors-cut-film-review-benedict-cumberbatch-tom-holland/ for details of the delayed release, and also Wikipedia information concerning the 1903 elephant electrocution of Topsy.

Hacked At The Polls

Last month we learned that computer systems used by both the U. S. Democratic National Committee (DNC) and the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) were hacked into, possibly by Russia.  The initial news reports were confirmed by the FBI, which is investigating the breaches.  While no actual damage appears to have been done—yet—it is not clear what the hackers might have learned, and what they might do with the information.  At a minimum, it is a chilling reminder that foreign powers can now remotely meddle with systems vital to our democratic process:  a political party's internal analytical tools, not to mention electronic voting machines themselves.

A recent article on the Politico website enlarges on the latter possibility:  that hackers, either foreign or domestic, could diddle with electronic voting machines and the associated systems enough to throw an election.  Some computer scientists at Princeton have made a career out of showing how various brands of electronic voting machines can be hacked using simple methods that are accessible to clever teenagers.  Usually, the hacks require physical access to the machines for a time, but if polling-place workers are not quite vigilant enough, one can imagine this happening.  And then anything can happen, from blatant count manipulation to subtle effects that would be hard to catch in an audit.  The most vulnerable machines appear to be the touchscreen types that produce no paper audit trail.  Many states and counties have recognized this vulnerability and have switched to optically-scanned paper ballots which automatically produce a paper trail, but even these systems can be hacked into at the count-totalling level where laptops and computer networks are used to add up the results.  But there are still a lot of old vulnerable touchscreen systems in use.

The Politico article decries the inconsistent patchwork nature of our voting technology in the U. S., but fails to note that this can also be regarded as a strength.  For offshore hackers to arrange a major hijack of a national election and be fairly sure it would work, they would have to target up-for-grabs states (several of them), get detailed information on the wide variety of systems being used, and devise sub-hacks for each one.  While this kind of operation could be carried out, it's hard to see how, unless the foreign power had spies on the ground in the various states to provide information that would not be available any other way.  Nevertheless, huge elections can come down to a few critical votes in a few critical states, or even one, as the "hanging-chad" adventures of the Florida vote count of 2000 proved, leaving the whole nation in suspense for weeks and making the U. S. Supreme Court an unwilling participant in the election as well. 

While I normally eschew discussions of politics in this blog, I will limit my comments on the current Presidential contest to a phrase I heard from someone whose position prevented him from venting a more frank opinion about the candidates:  "It's a pity." 

Pitiful or not, national electons are a vital part of the way the U. S. government is made beholden to the people, and it is in the interest of every citizen to see that the process is as fair and transparent as possible.  If a foreign country manages to put its thumb on the scales, so to speak, it would betray the election's whole purpose and be tantamount to invasion by a foreign power.  For the same reason, contributions to domestic political campaigns by foreign entities are generally prohibited by law.

Voting in elections is an odd mix of the highly traditional and the cutting-edge high-tech.  Most applications of engineering have fairly clearcut goals:  build a bridge here to carry so much traffic and cost this much and take that long to build, for instance.  But in voting, it's not always clear what problems engineers are being called upon to solve. 

Some readers may know that Thomas Edison's first patent was for an electric vote recorder that received votes made by pushing buttons, and printed out a paper tally of the results.  He patented it in 1869 and a colleague tried to get the U. S. Congress to adopt it.  But getting through a roll-call vote faster by machine was not something that the committee evaluating the machine wanted to do.  As the committee chairman reportedly said, "If there is any invention on earth that we don't want down here, that is it."  It wasn't until the 1880s that any kind of voting machine was used in the U. S. in a general election, and legislatures were among the last entities to adopt them for their own voting process.  So even the great inventive genius himself misjudged what highly political organizations really want in the way of automated voting.

Increasingly today, politics is about power.  Power has always been a factor, but as other cultural forces—tradition, religion, courtesy, even fairness—wane in influence, the vacuum tends to be filled by the raw lust for power.  So it is understandable that regimes and individuals who see power as the mainspring and goal of politics will stop at nothing to attain their aims.  Just as our military has to exercise constant vigilance to keep armed threats at bay, we now have to defend the integrity of our elections from foreign interference, which is a new thing to a lot of local officials whose worst concern used to be finding enough volunteers to man the polls. 

One of the best ideas for safeguarding election integrity was proposed by a Princeton cybersecurity expert quoted in the Politico article.  If each lowly precinct simply posts its results in real time, on paper (and I would add, on the Internet too), allowing independent vote-checking agencies to compile vote totals, this step essentially eliminates any chance of an outside entity hacking into the vote-totaling systems, because the multiple independent tallies would agree and call into question the "official" total.  To some extent, news agencies already do this, but the exact data paths by which they obtain their vote totals is not obvious to the viewer, and making it so would both raise their credibility and help ensure the integrity of the whole system.

Casting a meaningful ballot is one of the most important privileges of living in a democratic society.  It is up to engineers and programmers to make sure that the voting systems this fall will allow every qualified citizen to do that.  But it is up to the citizens to use that power wisely.

Sources:  I thank my wife for drawing my attention to the Politico article, "How to Hack an Election in 7 Minutes" by Ben Wofford, published online on Aug. 5, 2016 at http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/08/2016-elections-russia-hack-how-to-hack-an-election-in-seven-minutes-214144.  I also referred to a July 30 NBC News article about the hacking of the Democratic Party systems at http://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/clinton-campaign-computer-system-was-hacked-report-n620051.  Details of Edison's first patented invention, the vote recorder that nobody wanted, can be found at http://www.techtimes.com/articles/132791/20160211/thomas-edisons-first-patented-invention-could-have-drastically-changed-u-s-history.htm.