Software Bug Adds 5K Votes To Election 239
eldavojohn writes "You may be able to argue that a five-thousand-vote error is a small price to pay for a national election, but these errors are certainly inadmissible on a much smaller scale. According to the Rapid City Journal, a software glitch added 4,875 phantom ballots in a South Dakota election for a seat on the city council. It's not a hardware security problem this time; it's a software glitch. Although not unheard of in electronic voting, this bug was about to cause a runoff vote since the incumbent did not hold a high enough percentage of the vote. That is no longer the case after the numbers were corrected. Wired notes it's probably a complex bug as it is not just multiplying the vote count by two. Here's to hoping that AutoMark follows suit and releases the source code for others to scrutinize."
Uh oh... (Score:3, Funny)
The software has achieved sentience and is trying to elect its robot overlords! Before anyone else... I for one welcome our democratically elected robot overlords.
Re:Uh oh... (Score:2, Funny)
Bug? (Score:2, Funny)
Probably counting screen touches outside buttons (Score:2, Funny)
Re:How hard can it be? (Score:5, Funny)
Ah, "Shaky" Jim was off his meds again.
Re:How hard is it for a computer to do addition? (Score:5, Funny)
Additions just aren't so simple anymore in concurrent computing. The obvious way to do addition in gcc c would be:
totalVotes[candidate]++;
but this will totally screw up the vote count, whereas
__sync_add_and_fetch(&totalVotes[candidate], 1);
gets it right.
looking at the source code (Score:3, Funny)
if( vote = my_candidate )
{
my_candidate_votes = my_candidate_votes + 2;
} else {
other_candidate_votes = other_candidate_votes + 1;
}
In the source code as complex as this, you will probably need a PhD in computer science...
Re:How hard is it for a computer to do addition? (Score:5, Funny)
void vote(int candidate)
{
switch (candidate)
{
case GEORGE_BUSH:
totalVotes[GEORGE_BUSH] ++;
case AL_GORE:
totalVotes[AL_GORE] ++;
break;
}
}
It's simple (Score:5, Funny)
Someone forgot to clear the chad bit!
Doubles (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Blckboxvoting.org (Score:5, Funny)
Yes, but it's hilarious when there were only 5600 actual votes cast. +/-100% error bars, is good enough for government work apparently.
Re:How hard is it for a computer to do addition? (Score:3, Funny)
Real life appears to disagree with you! :D
Re:It's simple (Score:1, Funny)
It's worse than that. Some of the bits were in an indeterminate "hanging bit" state which take much longer to process. Combine that with the fact that the bits were not actually located in their associated bytes, but were rather distributed in a "butterfly-byte" configuration and you see how difficult it is to arrive at an accurate total.
Re:How hard is it for a computer to do addition? (Score:5, Funny)
PuhLease (Score:3, Funny)
whiners (Score:3, Funny)
A software error resulting in +/- 5000 votes cast is unacceptable on any level, even if it gets drowned out on the national level in the US.
You know, some people are always complaining. First you complain that there's not enough people turning out to vote each election, that people are apathetic, etc. Finally someone develops some software that fixes that problem and now everyone complains about that!!
The real issue (Score:3, Funny)
The real issue isn't that the votes were miscounted in South Dakota.
It's that I bought them for South Carolina!
Re:How hard is it for a computer to do addition? (Score:3, Funny)
Re:How hard is it for a computer to do addition? (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Uh oh... (Score:4, Funny)
No no no, it's clearly a glitch. Counting numbers (e.g. 1+1) really isn't a computer's strong suit, so it's understandable that it would sometimes do this, 1+ 1 + 1 + 1 + 5000 + 1 + 1.
Re:Uh oh... (Score:4, Funny)
I'd mod you funny but I've completely lost faith in electronic voting.
Re:How hard is it for a computer to do addition? (Score:2, Funny)
Because when a computer has to count 10000 votes (assuming each machine counts and then sends the total) it would just put too much pressure on a single thread. Isn't it obvious?