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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."
I mean really, I'm pretty sure I could write a program with a couple of buttons and a counter for each.
What's going on here?
It still amazes me how "hard" it is to write a simple program. First have something to scan the ID, check that its unique then move to the voting. Have a few radio buttons that you click, then hit submit, each radio button corresponds to a candidate or a choice, they are added up and give you the results. How the crap do you screw that up?
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
A software error resulting in +/- 5000 votes cast is unacceptable on any level, even if it gets drowned out on the national level in the US.
There is absolutely no reason or excuse for software to miscount votes. It isn't rocket science.
I know I'm preaching to the choir here, but this shit just pisses me off. It's a matter of national and local integrity that our voting systems are transparent. Please support blackboxvoting.org if you don't have the time to get involved in a deeper fashion (calling/writing your legislators, etc).
Note: I'm not affiliated with blackboxvoting.org. I just appreciate their work.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
Why is a voting system doing any kind of math at all? I voted yesterday in Belgium on a computer that puts my vote onto a card, which is then tallied separately. This same system has been working since at least 1995 with zero reports of fraud or failure (except normal "computer is broken" style failures).
How can a computer "add phantom ballots"? Software does not just "glitch", it breaks in ways that depend entirely on how it was built.
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.
While I'm as puzzled as you are on why its doing simple addition wrong, I can understand why you would want a computer to do the math though, as it should be more error-proof than humans.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
yeah, cause the difference in saying something like "x+y/2" or "(x+y)/2" is obvious fraud, as it is a bug that wouldn't crash the system.
It's probably more like they aren't rolling back some transaction on a network error or something. Network timeouts, etc, are probably doubling up the votes from that machine. It's probably an unusual error so it doesn't get caught in testing. Like busy networks on election night? It's not that hard to imagine.
-Unresolved symbol? Byte me!
Right. Ask a computer to count 1 million records and stop exactly on the millionth, and then ask a person to count 1 million cards and stop on the millionth. If you had to bet your life on it, who would you think would be more precise? Obviously computers have value.
On the other hand, I'm a firm believer in the idea that the source code should be available for review to make sure there are no weird bugs that could multiply votes, and there should be a paper trail so that the computer can be checked for voter fraud. Computers are more efficient, but not only are they more efficient at doing the right thing, and they're more efficient at doing the wrong thing. If the code tells them to count votes incorrectly (whether it's fraud or an inadvertent bug) they will very efficiently count the votes incorrectly.
Sure, go ahead and add a field to the table and you've got a record of who voted for who, which is awesome!
The problem for slashdotters is that there is more to a voting system than JUST counting the votes properly.
You have to count the votes properly, provide proper auditing to validate that everyones vote got counted for who they voted for, all the while making sure that you don't actually know who specifically voted for who, even though you may need to prove that their vote was counted for a specific candidate later.
If all they had to do was count votes, they would have gotten it right cause even the $0.50/hour programmers from India can get that part right.
It does blow my mind however that we still get errors in electronic voting due to bugs, these companies are utterly failing and should be banned from making software such as these as soon as a bug like this is detected. It is not acceptable to have not tested your software properly before hand to detect this crap.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
why would you have multiple threads running on a tally?
"We returned the General to El Salvador, or maybe Guatemala, it's difficult to tell from 10,000 feet"