An account circulates that an electronic voting machine in the 2003 Belgian federal election credited one candidate with 4096 extra votes, a power of two, and that the discrepancy was attributed to a single-event upset from cosmic radiation. No claim is made here about the count, the attribution, or whether any investigation reached that conclusion.
Editorial judgements on a 0 to 10 scale, argued in the notes below and nowhere else. They order a list. They are not evidence and they never appear in a claim.
On any total that matters, carry a checksum or a redundant count, and treat a discrepancy that is a clean power of two as a hardware hypothesis rather than a logic one.
Triage questions. Find the official Belgian report or parliamentary record rather than the conference slide that usually carries this. Was 4096 the figure, and was it a bit flip in a counter or a bit flip in a transmitted total. Crucially: did anyone establish cosmic radiation as the cause, or was it the only hypothesis left standing after others were excluded, which is a different and weaker claim. This lead is a strong candidate for the falsehood pile rather than the incident pile: the number being a power of two is suggestive, not probative.