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E-Voting Glitch: 19,000 Voters, 144,000 Votes

Posted by timothy on from the that's-some-glitch dept.

nick_davison writes "The Indianapolis Star is reporting the latest case of 'interesting' E-voting results. Tuesday's Boone County election, using MicroVote software returned 144,000 votes from 19,000 registered voters. After much panicking and tracking down the bug, the actual number of votes turned out as 5,352. With yet another mistake, does anyone still trust closed-source electronic voting?"

3 of 601 comments (clear)

  1. Karma by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Redundant

    Lebanon -- Boone County officials are searching for an answer to the computer glitch that spewed out impossible numbers and interrupted an otherwise uneventful election process Tuesday.

    "I about had a heart attack," County Clerk Lisa Garofolo said of the breakdown that came as an eager crowd watched computer-generated vote totals being projected onto a wall of the County Courthouse rotunda.

    "I'm assuming the glitch was in the software."

    A lengthy collaboration between the county's information technology director and advisers from the MicroVote software producer fixed the votes. But before that, computer readings of stored voting machine data showed far more votes than registered voters.

    "It was like 144,000 votes cast," said Garofolo, whose corrected accounting showed just 5,352 ballots from a pool of fewer than 19,000 registered voters.

    "Believe me, there was nobody more shook up than I was."

  2. Open Source Isn't the Answer by goldspider · · Score: -1, Redundant
    ...well, maybe it is for technical folks like us who read Slashdot, but to the vast majority of the country, opening the source of these programs wil be utterly useless. Your neighbor Bob probably doesn't know an 'include' from an 'endif'.

    It seems to me that our lawmakers, in their infinite wisdom, corrected a complicated voting system by replacing it with an even more complicated one. What went so wrong with putting an "X" next to a name on a slip of paper?

    --
    "Ask not what your country can do for you." --John F. Kennedy
  3. how hard is it? by SQLz · · Score: 0, Redundant

    I mean,its not like responding to an event and incrementing a variable takes that much programming skill. The only reason these machines are having these problems is becase they are designed to allow people to rig elections. At best, its simply bad programming but I don't believe that.