Software Bug Adds 5K Votes To Election

eldavojohn writes "You may be able to argue that a five-thousand-vote error is a small price to pay for a national election, but these errors are certainly inadmissible on a much smaller scale. According to the Rapid City Journal, a software glitch added 4,875 phantom ballots in a South Dakota election for a seat on the city council. It's not a hardware security problem this time; it's a software glitch. Although not unheard of in electronic voting, this bug was about to cause a runoff vote since the incumbent did not hold a high enough percentage of the vote. That is no longer the case after the numbers were corrected. Wired notes it's probably a complex bug as it is not just multiplying the vote count by two. Here's to hoping that AutoMark follows suit and releases the source code for others to scrutinize."

Comments

Re:How.....

[filesiteguy]

At least here in LA County it is extremely complicated.

Given that the law requires us to have a maximum of 1,000 residents per precinct and that ballots must not show the same candidates in the same order on any subsequent precincts, there are a ton of complications. Keep in mind, we have well over 8M potential voters in LA County and 5,000 precincts. (Let's not even get into the fact that we print ballots in eight languages by Federal law.)

In the November election, we counted well over 4,000,000 ballots between about 8:30 PM and 2:00 AM. We have 24 tally machines which each read ballot cards. The tally machines used to be setup to read punch cards, but after the screw up in Florida 2000, they were converted to optical scan. They must be continually calibrated. Since we do not use a vendor for the tally software, I can tell you the programming is quite complex.

The programs are all written in assembler. The tally machines know nothing of the votes, just which bubble (these are IBM cards similar to the ones used in mainframes back in teh '60s and '70s.) is filled in. Each machine must be loaded with the hundreds of possible ballot group layouts so that - when the bubbles are read - it can feed the information to the collector computer. (Which is connected via Token Ring by the way, so it is not on our ethernet network.) The collector computer then simply feeds this information - ballot group, numbers filled in, presents reporting - to the mainframe. This computer then assembles all that and comes out with a running total in any given vote.

So how?

Here's how. One piece of software allows the contests to be generated. (Presidential, city council, county supervisors, Board of education, senatorial, state assembly, state Senate, congressional, propositions, water board....) Then the contests are consolidated as necessary. The precincts (given a TRA - Tax Rate Area) are setup and another software starts doing ballot layout for each of the ballot groups. (We had around 300 ballot groups in November combined with the 5,000 precincts.) The printer prints all this and the ballots are sent via truck to the polling locations on the day before the election. On election day, people come in and vote. (Let's not forget the 700,000 absentee voters in LA County who sent in their votes prior to the election and still ahd to be sorted and counted on election evening - by precinct and ballot group.)

After 8:00 PM, the ballots boxes are brought in (via Sheriff), unsealed, opened, scanned in (to a ballot tracking software) and then sorted by ballot group within a precinct. They are fed into the tally machines and counted.

Just to make sure the tally machines are calibrated, the team runs a "logic and accuracy" test prior to and after the actual counting. The machines' counts are set to zero, a group of ballots are run through and the expected counts should be totaled up.

If any of this process goes wrong, you'll have an error.

Too bad the election terrorists made sure electronic voting was disallowed.

Re:Uh oh...

[sexconker]

The sad thing is, the droids have convinced you there are only two parties!

RON PAUL 2012!