Hard Evidence of Voting Machine Addition Errors

goombah99 writes "Princeton Professor, Ed Felton, has posted a series of blog entries in which he shows the printed tapes he obtained from the NJ voting machines don't report the ballots correctly. In response to the first one, Sequoia admitted that the machines had a known software design error that did not correctly record which kind of ballots were cast (republican or democratic primary ballots) but insisted the vote totals were correct. Then, further tapes showed this explanation to be insufficient. In response, State officials insisted that the (poorly printed) tapes were misread by Felton. Again further tapes showed this not to be a sufficient explanation. However all those did not foreclose the optimistic assessment that the errors were benign — that is, the possibility that vote totals might really be correct even though the ballot totals were wrong and the origin of the errors had not been explained. Now he has found (well-printed) tapes that show what appears to be hard proof that it's the vote totals that are wrong, since two different readout methods don't agree. Sequoia has made trade-secret legal threats against those wishing to mount an independent examination of the equipment. One small hat-tip to Sequoia: at least they are reporting enough raw data in different formats that these kinds of errors can come to light — that lesson should be kept in mind when writing future requirements for voting machines."

Comments

That may be...

[Anonymous Coward]

...but these are good, solid, Republican errors!

God bless the American Voting System!

Is this the code?

[Anonymous Coward]

Votes::Votes()
{
        count = 0;
}

Votes::Votes(Candidate * pcand)
{
        secretHandle = pcand;
        count = 0;
}

Votes::operator ++()
{
        if(secretHandle){
                                if(secretHandle->get_id()==GOOD_CANDIDATE) count +=5;
        }
        else ++count;
}

heh.

[Kingrames]

public boolean IsVoteTallyCorrect()
{
  return true;
}

Next article:

[sm62704]

"Princeton Professor, Ed Felton was arrested today for violation of the DMCA..."

Re:I've just got to ask...

[SoupGuru]

Well, hiding all those backdoors has got to be pretty hard, right?

Re:Don't forget ...

[spun]

is it troll month on slashdot? Heheheh, You must be new here. Really, really new. You kids these days, you don't know trolling. What you see now is nothing compared to the great trolls of days past. Twofo, meh. Meept, now there was a troll. Or the maresex guy, or 'think of your breathing.' Why, we even had secret SIDs for trolls to meet in to discuss the art of trolling. Trolltalk, that was here! Then there was this whole spoke thing. Sometimes you were 'on teh spoke' and sometimes you weren't. Few knew what the hell it meant, but everyone said it.

Troll month. hehe. It is troll Tuesday, though.

Re:I've just got to ask...

[Digital Vomit]

It's really easy actually. I'll get it started:

private short DemocratVoters;
private long RepublicanVoters;
const int ThirdPartyVoters = 0;

...

Re:Simple solution?

[Anonymous Coward]

Equal time clause requires this:

Wife: Show me your receipt for candidate X tonight or no noogies.