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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."
There is a very simple, comparatively low-tech fix for broken elections that involve paper ballots.
As we do in Humboldt County, CA, run all ballots through an off-the-shelf scanner and run an independent count with independent, open source software. Ballot Browser (open source, Python, GPL from me) is available for tweaking and the basics are explained in April's Python Magazine. Or, it's really not that difficult to write your own bubble-reading software.
How do you know this system is fraud free? Reading your comment doesn't convince me one bit. I voted too, in the Netherlands, and for the first time in years I had to use a pencil again. No guarantee that there are no counting errors, but they won't be systematic on a large scale.
The Belgian government publishes the source code of the voting software the moment the bureaus close. The software of yesterday's election can be found here: http://www.ibz.rrn.fgov.be/index.php?id=1152&L=1