Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

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.'"

12 of 165 comments (clear)

  1. Shock! by rueger · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Hold on! You're surely not suggesting that those modern electronic computer machines might not work properly!

    No, this must be the sneaky terrorist attack on democracy that Bin Laden promised last week!

    --
    Three Squirrels
  2. 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.

    1. Re:what were they using? by orkysoft · · Score: 3, Funny

      10 REM REMEMBER THIS KIND OF SHIT?
      20 REM IT'S BEEN YEARS FOR ME, BUT IT TURNS OUT I CAN STILL WRITE IT...
      30 REM THERE IS ABSOLUTELY NO BIAS IN THIS POLL PROGRAM, I SWEAR TO GOD!
      40 INPUT "HOW MANY VOTES TO STORE? ", MAXVOTES
      50 DIM VOTES(MAXVOTES - 1)
      60 FOR I = 0 TO MAXVOTES - 1: VOTES(I) = 1: NEXT I
      70 CURRENTVOTE = 0
      80 REPEAT
      90 INPUT "DO YOU WANT TO VOTE FOR (1) PRESIDENT BUSH OR (2) THE FLIPFLOPPER KERRY? ", ANSWER
      100 IF ANSWER != 1 AND ANSWER != 2 THEN ANSWER = 1
      110 IF CURRENTVOTE < MAXVOTES THEN VOTES(CURRENTVOTE) = ANSWER ELSE PRINT "NOT ENOUGH ROOM TO STORE THIS VOTE!"
      120 CURRENTVOTE = CURRENTVOTE + 1
      130 GOSUB 1000 : REM DETERMINE IF ELECTION IS OVER YET
      140 UNTIL ELECTIONOVER = 1
      150 BUSHVOTES = 0 : KERRYVOTES = 0
      160 FOR I = 0 TO MAXVOTES - 1
      170 IF VOTES(I) = 1 THEN BUSHVOTES = BUSHVOTES + 1
      180 IF VOTES(I) = 2 THEN KERRYVOTES = KERRYVOTES + 1
      190 NEXT I
      200 PRINT "BUSH GOT " + BUSHVOTES + " VOTES."
      210 PRINT "KERRY GOT " + KERRYVOTES + " VOTES."
      220 PRINT "HAVE A NICE DAY!"
      230 END
      1000 REM I DON'T RECALL HOW TO GET THE TIME FROM BASIC
      1010 REM BUT THERE WERE SO MANY DIFFERENT KINDS OF BASIC
      1020 REM I LIKED GFA BASIC BACK IN THE DAY...
      1030 REM NO LINE NUMBERS, ONLY ONE INSTRUCTION PER LINE
      1040 REM THIS IS JUST WRITTEN TO WHAT I IMAGINE A REALLY BASIC BASIC WOULD BE LIKE.
      1050 RETURN

      --

      I suffer from attention surplus disorder.
  3. Happened in florida by moosesocks · · Score: 5, Informative

    Don't look now, but something even dumber happened in florida as well.

    To summarize, since there should be no more than 32,000 people in a precinct, the machines were not configured to handle more votes than that. As a result, they counted BACKWARDS once the 32,000 person limit was reached.

    Methinks this is a buffer overflow issue (32,768 votes as opposed to the 32,000 quoted in the article). How thick can you be to design a polling system storing votes in an int...

    --
    -- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
    1. Re:Happened in florida by cgenman · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Why would you ever use a signed int in a voting machine? Obviously they should have used a much larger available counting variable, but how could someone writing the code think "Eh, maybe we'll need negatives"?

      Now that's incompetence you can count on.

      --
      The ______ Agenda
    2. Re:Happened in florida by hab136 · · Score: 3, Informative
      How in the hell did one voting machine take over 32000 votes? Suppose they had a 16 hour window to vote, that would mean it averaged less than 2 seconds per vote.

      Read the article:

      Election officials quickly determined the problem was caused by the Unity Software that pulls together votes from five machines tabulating absentee ballots.

      In other words, they were feeding absentee ballots to 5 machines, and then the machine that added up those 5 machines' totals overflowed.

      No 16 hour time limit, as these are the mail-in votes.

  4. It gets worse. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    The deeper you dig the more dirt piles up.

    Mandate
    this
    lying
    cheating
    sinners.

  5. 4530? That's nothing. by BortQ · · Score: 4, Funny
    4530 is nothing compared to all the votes that I knocked off when I hacked that Florida machine. You'd think they would get suspicious if you stay in the booth for sooo long, but I guess they are used to the slow-pokes in the sunshine state.

    Anyway, thanks /. for giving me all the info about evoting fraud that I needed before the election. I was expecting for it not to work, but the machines are dead fuckin simple.

    God bless America, and my h4xxor 5killz 2.

    --

    A Multiplayer Strategy Game for Mac OS X, Windows, and Linux
  6. A deeper problem? by xenocide2 · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Everyone was afraid of what would happen if things went blatantly wrong. We appear to have avoided that malady. But there was always the question, how will we know if they've tampered with it? The answer was a meek "Well, the exit polls will keep the ballots true."

    And today we see the exit polls distinctly differing from the actual counts, and collectively sigh that our nation won't go through the same disaster it did four years ago. If we can't trust the exit polls, why can we trust the voting machines?

    --
    I Browse at +4 Flamebait

    Open Source Sysadmin

  7. 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

  8. Re:The truth is: It doesn't matter. by TiggsPanther · · Score: 3, Informative

    In this case the /. summary (at least) isn't implying that the lost votes would have changed who won. And that's not really the issue in hand.

    No, regardless of whether the votes would have made a difference or not it's bloody worrying that such an error was overlooked. If these machines become more and more used and the operators ignore messages like this routinely then next time (whether in the US, UK, or anywhere else) it might well be a significant difference lost.

    --
    Tiggs
    "120 chars should be enough for everyone..."
  9. some unverified statistical data. by jyang · · Score: 3, Interesting

    following post is from http://www.democraticunderground.com/

    Just for example:

    Franklin County. 77.3% of voters registered Dems. Only 15.9% registered Reps. 58.5% of the votes reported FOR BUSH???

    Holmes County. 72.7% of voters registered Dems. Only 21.3% registered Reps. 77% of the votes reported FOR BUSH???

    Calhoun County. 82.4% of voters registered Dems. Only 11.9% registered Reps. 63.4% of the votes reported FOR BUSH???

    See the data in following links.
    http://ustogether.org/Florida_Election.htm
    http://ustogether.org/election04/florida_vote_pa tt .htm

    --
    --- You make things foolproof, and they'll find you a damn fool.