Diebold Admits Ohio Machines May Lose Votes

I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes "Premier Election Solutions (a subsidiary of Diebold) has acknowledged a flaw that causes the systems to lose votes. It cannot be patched before the election and the machines are used in half of Ohio's counties, but they are issuing guidelines for avoiding the problem that presumably contain a work-around. While Diebold initially blamed anti-virus software for the glitch, they have now discovered that the bug was their own fault for not recording votes to memory when the cards are uploaded in 'certain circumstances' — something their initial analysis missed. It would be nice to hope that Ohio poll workers would be tech-savvy enough to make this a non-issue, but they had poll worker shortages last year and might need tech-savvy people to volunteer."

Comments

LEAKED: Source code of innocent bug

[bigtallmofo]

Turns out Diebold accidentally leaked a snippet of their C# source code that shows the conditions that the machines may fail to register votes:

if(vote.Party == "Democrat" && democratvotes % 3)
democratvotes++;

Oopsie!

The circumstances?

[InvisblePinkUnicorn]

Don't blame me, I voted for a';DROP TABLE users; SELECT * FROM data WHERE name LIKE '%.

Re:The circumstances?

[Monsieur Canard]

Oh man, you missed a prime opportunity for a Little Bobby Tables reference.

http://xkcd.com/327/

Re:LEAKED: Source code of innocent bug

[eln]

Only on Slashdot would you not only get a joke written in C#, but also multiple replies complaining that it's not technically sound.

Certain Circumstances

[Kaptain Kruton]

While Diebold initially blamed anti-virus software for the glitch, they have now discovered that the bug was their own fault for not recording votes to memory when the cards are uploaded in 'certain circumstances'

"Certain circumstances" -- a.k.a "voting"

Re:LEAKED: Source code of innocent bug

[KDR_11k]

On Slashdot C# is the joke.