Click Here to Download Your Free Dumbold Voting Machine for The Sims!

Click here to email a link to the page to a friend!

The Dumbold Voting Machine for The Sims enables the simulated people in your virtual dollhouse to vote!

It's an interactive "get out the vote" public service message, in the form of a free downloadable Sims object.

This Sims object is an electronic voting machine that lets your Sims vote between four candidates: Kerry, Bush, Nader and Badnarik.

I've included informative text in this Sims object, which it displays in illustrated dialogs to educate players about electronic voting machines.

A major side-show is the "Monkey" item on the pie menu, which activates all kinds of cool easter eggs, and displays lots of in-game information and news about electronic voting machines.

Please give this Dumbold Voting Machine a good pounding on, and tell me if you have any problems (besides the usual problems endemic to electronic voting machines, which I've programmed into this Sims object on purpose).

At first look, it appears to be a fully functional voting machine. But it actually has a lot of fatal bugs and hidden features, just like real electronic voting machines!

Highlights of Cheats, Bugs and Easter Eggs

The Dumbold Voting Machine is programmed with cheats, bugs and easter eggs, which you can discover and read about by playing around with it. It demonstrates and simulates some alarming problems with real world electronic voting machines, with many surprising effects and subtle interactions:

Baxter the Chimpanzee Erases the Voting Log.
When you put the voting machine into debug mode and clear the votes, you will see a dialog with the hillarious picture and story of Baxter the Chimpanzee. In your web browser, you can watch the funny monkey movie showing Baxter erasing the voting log! Now your Sims can monkey around with the electronic Dumbold Voting Machines, go bananas hacking the system, fling poo and corrupt the election results just like the pros!

Vote or Die!
P. Diddy, lately a.k.a. Citizen Combs, says: "'You all are the X-factor, the wild card," Combs said. "`History is being made here. Our revolution has begun." "Young voters in this country are throwing away their power to have a say about education, healthcare, and any issue that affects them." Combs explains. "These things affect your life, so - Vote or Die!" (If you select Vote, you live. If you select Die, you either get electrocuted, or burst into flames, then you die.)

You punched out the screen!
Hey!!! You're supposed to touch the screen, not punch it! Next time, please don't take out your frustration with the lousy choice of candidates by punching the screen. That's not the way to get your vote counted. (Your Sim breaks the voting machine screen. You can repair it if you're skilled enough, but you might want to keep a handyman on call during the election!)

Osama Bin Laden Scares the Piss Out of You!!!
Osama Bin Laden wants to scare you into voting for George W Bush, because Bin Laden is grateful to Bush for outsourcing the job of hunting him down to Osama's good friends, the Afghan warlords. Bush's policies have strengthened Bin Laden's cause, and George W Bush says he's not worried about Osama Bin Laden. Bush and Bin Laden both want you to vote in response to your of fears, not in pursuit of your hopes. "Americans all know that Osama Bin Laden doesn't pick our president. The Supreme Court does." -Bill Maher (Your Sim empties their bladder, pisses their pants, and then runs away screaming!)

Accidentally Voting for Pat Buchanan.
When you select one of the four official candidates, sometimes it "accidentally" pops up an illustrated dialog asking for confirmation that you want to vote for Pat Buchanan! If you foolishly select "Yes", the voting machine breaks!

News about Black Box Voting.

News about CalTech-MIT/Voting Technology Project.

News about Diebold

News about EFF.

News about Verified Voting.

Dumbold Voting Machine Operating Instructions

The Sims will vote on their own, and it will pop up an illustrated dialog with a picture of the candidate they want to vote for, so you can press "Yes" to accept or "No" to cancel. You can also direct them to vote as you want. Each Sim can only vote once (unless you hack into the voting machine and reset the voter roll, or put it into debug mode so any Sim can vote as many times as they like).

When you put the voting machine into debug mode, you get a bunch of cool administrative commands on the pie menu, to enable the printer, enable the network, show votes, reset votes, reset voter roll, and factory reset. All of these items pop up dialogs with news related to the function you select (like the monkey resetting the vote log).

For your edutainment and edification, I've put pictures and logos into the dialogs, and broken up long news stories into several pages of dialogs so you can click through to read them, or cancel if you like. I've packed more than a hundred pieces of text into the object including dialog titles, text and buttons, so there's lots of interesting, important news you can read in the game.

The high concept, from a game design perspective [i.e. "bullshit alert"]: The Dumbold Voting Machine is intended to be a simple but intriguing puzzle you can "hack into" (like the cheat mode of The Matrix video game), while learning about real issues. It integrates interactive real-life "public service announcements", subversive "product displacements", and constitutionally protected "free speech". It addresses late breaking news, current events and political opinions. It's free speech and political commentary rendered as executable multimedia software. The Dumbold Voting Machine acts out the story interactivally, in a way that's fun to play and experiment with. It breaks down in frustrating "failure modes" with egregious "security holes" that illustrate some difficult problems with actual electronic voting machines in the real world. It's meant to stimulate discussion, illustrate how computer programming is free speech, and why all election software should be open source and publicly inspectable.

Dumbold Voting Machine Credits
Dumbold Voting Machine, by Don Hopkins.
Special thanks to SimBabes, SimSlice, Will Wright, Ted Selker, John Gilmore, Cindy Cohen, Alan Korn, Bev Harris, Baxter the Chimpanzee, Black Box Voting, EFF, Verified Voting, CalTech-MIT/Voting Technology Project.
This Sims object is open source software, as all voting machine software should be.
For more information, please visit: http://www.Dumbold.com