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"If we're going to be consistent and advocate freedom of speech we have to advocate freedom of encrypted speech too. The genie is out of the bottle, cryptologically."
- Neal Stephenson

Multivac  
  A computer with millions of facts.  

"...sometimes it took all night to count what everyone said and people were impatient. So they invented special machines which could look at the first few votes and compare them with the votes from the same places in previous years. That way the machine could compute how the total vote would be and who would be elected. You see?"

She nodded. "Like Multivac."

"The first computers were much smaller than Multivac. Bu the machines grew bigger and they could tell how the election would go from fewer and fewer votes. Then, at last, they built Multivac and it can tell from just one voter."

Technovelgy from Franchise, by Isaac Asimov.
Published by If: Worlds of Science Fiction in 1955
Additional resources -

Compare to Brains from The Cosmic Blinker by Eando Binder.

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Additional resources:
  More Ideas and Technology from Franchise
  More Ideas and Technology by Isaac Asimov
  Tech news articles related to Franchise
  Tech news articles related to works by Isaac Asimov

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