Belgium Election Hit by Cosmic Ray

During Belgium's 2003 federal election, officials noticed that a candidate in Schaerbeek had received 4,096 more votes than possible. Investigators ruled out fraud and traced the problem to a single-event upset, when a cosmic ray struck the computer's memory and flipped a single bit from 0 to 1. That one flip instantly inflated the tally, and the anomaly was only caught because the total vote count exceeded the number of registered voters.

Previous Fact Next Fact