Diebold Fails Again in San Diego

ptudor writes "An article in today's San Diego Union Tribune reveals nearly 3000 absentee ballots in the San Diego primary one month ago were miscounted. 'The miscounts occurred because multiple scanners simultaneously fed the absentee ballot data into the computer tabulation system. The large number of ballots and candidates on them overwhelmed the system. Diebold spokesman David Bear said the company has provided a software fix to the county for the new problem.' The irregularities were found in a routine post-election review." You can also read more about the problems on election day.

Comments

The Bug Revealed!

[ackthpt]

Where it really went wrong:

Bob: "Hmm. The first republican got no votes, the Cthuluist candidate got 34% overall and we got all these crashes on people who voted for Clover."
Jeff: "Jeff, it's base zero, not base one."
Bob: "Oops."

Re:The Bug Revealed!

[AuMatar]

So- the problem is that Diebold employess are nuts who talk to themselves?

Just 3000?

[Anonymous Coward]

They really ARE using Microsoft Access ;)

Great!

[Knight Thrasher]

Let's take a vote on who pays for all these mishaps, the taxpayers or the company!... no, wait...

Re:Huh?

[flossie]

there are sites on the net that conduct thousands of transactions in very short periods of time

But they don't always do it well (164 %)

Voter fraud...

[doorbot.com]

"The irregularities were found in a routine post-election review."

Oh, so that's what they're calling it...

Yep, they found a race condition

[Anonymous Coward]

if ( voter != white )
discard(vote);

From the Daily Show last night

[EvanED]

Jon Stewart: "But these things can't be that insecure..."
Some security researcher: "We broke into the board of elections and completely changed the result, erasing all of our traces and got back out"
Stewart: "...um, but sure, you give a guy a day and..."
S.S.R.: "We did it in 5 minutes."

[Paraphrased, but the idea is here... Also, it's possible that the last statement by the SSR was not referring to the entire operation; the Daily Show appearso to have a habit of making deceptive cuts. But who knows...]

Re:From the Daily Show last night

[Hiro Antagonist]

People who use a Comedy Central as a new source are not qualified to comment on the news!

Why, it's more accurate than FOX...

Ha! - I reviewed their stuff

[Devi8R]

When a consultant I reviewed their product suite as well as other vendors such as Votec. They use MS SQL Server and Visual Basic. How funny. I knew their products would fail. Their off the record breagging involved hyping their M$ team and saying they got some of the best minds in the MCSE market!!!! As well they felt my ideas with using Transaction servers with their product suite for verification was a bit a farfetched. Uh huh!! Anyways - it is funny. Cheers

Slashdot readers, examine carefully that article

[0x0d0a]

Read the last paragraph on that article you linked to. I ask you, Slashdotters, is there *not* a great election conspiracy afoot? :-)

Re:I wrote the core code that Diebold needs....

[LMCBoy]

That's actually the code they use, but you forgot the variable declaration, which is critical:

char democratCount(0);
long int republicanCount(0);