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...

[BlitzTech]

... could it possibly be so hard to write voting software? It just... I... but...

It's gotta be deliberate. Right?

How difficult can it be

[guruevi]

We keep hearing about these mishaps. But really, how difficult can it be to build a functional counter? The current electronic voting systems are about as reliable as the average poll on a random website.