The Sun Has Voted in An Election

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In 2003, something bizarre happened during a Belgian election: a politician received exactly 4,096 unexpected votes. It wasn’t fraud, and it wasn’t a software bug—it was space. A stray particle from the sun struck a voting computer's memory chip and caused what's known as a Single Event Upset (SEU). That’s when radiation flips a single bit in a computer’s memory, turning a 0 into a 1. In this case, that flipped bit was in the 13th position of a binary number—adding exactly 2¹², or 4,096 votes, to the candidate’s total. The vote didn’t hold up, thanks to an audit trail, but the incident became a legendary example of how fragile electronic voting can be without backups. It's one of the only times you can say the sun literally interfered with democracy.