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4503 Electronic Votes Lost in NC

Posted by CowboyNeal on from the exited-polls dept.

ctnp writes "While it wouldn't have made a difference in the outcome, 4530 votes were lost in one North Carolina county after one machine was configured to store 3,005 votes instead of the expected 10,500. 'The machines flash a warning message when there is no more room for storing ballots. 'Evidently, this message was either ignored or overlooked,' he [Jack Gerbel, CEO of machine-providing UniLect] wrote.'"

2 of 165 comments (clear)

  1. what were they using? by my_fake_account · · Score: 4, Interesting

    What were they using? 8k memory sticks?

    I live in NC. Yes, the ballot was long this time, but it still wasn't much data per voter. I don't think there were any votes that would have taken more than three bits (and none more than four) to store the choice.

    Even if the entire ballot is stored verbatim per voter, I still don't think it would have amounted to more than one or two k per ballot.

    The storage device must be tiny. Or the ballot data must be really inefficiently laid out.

    My county uses pen and paper for voting. It's cheap and easy.

  2. Bad design? by spiff42 · · Score: 4, Interesting
    Isn't it a design flaw if the machine acceps several thousand votes and dosn't display the warning until after the vote has been committed. Why not make it impossible to input a new vote once the limit has been reached? In that case it would not be possible to overlook or ignore the flashing message.

    Of course I live in a country where we are still using pen and paper. Also, I guess we would have a more difficult task of creating a UI for electronic voting, since we have 10+parties and personal votes with several candidates per party.

    Anyway, congrats to the winners, although I would rather have seen Kerry as your president.

    /Spiff