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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.'"

6 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. 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
  3. It gets worse. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    The deeper you dig the more dirt piles up.

    Mandate
    this
    lying
    cheating
    sinners.

  4. 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
  5. 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