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

How hard is it for a computer to do addition?

[pieterh]

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.

Re:How hard is it for a computer to do addition?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, it's a threading issue. If you have multiple threads trying to update the value, some of them won't count. You'd either need to use a lock (and probably mark the variables as volatile) or use some kind of atomic update (like a read-modify-write operation).

Still, you'd have to be an idiot to even try to count votes as they're coming in. A much better approach would be to use a database. Database servers are already really good at handling concurrency and scaling. When a vote is cast, simply add a record to the database. Once the election's over, do something like "SELECT COUNT(*), candidate_id FROM votes GROUP BY candidate_id", and the results will be calculated based on the records in the database.

Really, you could only screw this up if you insisted on developing the entire system from scratch, rather than going with existing, well-tested code.

tampering?

[Ltap]

TFA only tells me the numbers and the guy's plans, nothing about the actual bug. What was it? It seems awfully hard to screw up adding two numbers together to get a third number, which is basically what that software was doing. Has it occurred to anyone that it might have been tampering? It seems to me that, with the fairly large (tens of thousands) number of votes, adding or removing just enough to make it a runoff would be the perfect vote tampering scheme - too little to draw much attention, but enough to actually make a difference.