Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Software Bug Adds 5K Votes To Election

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the margin-of-error dept.

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."

7 of 239 comments (clear)

  1. WTH by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Redundant

    Voting is just addition. Why is it so hard for these people to get it right?

    Would you like candidate/proposal A? Yes/No

    *sigh*

  2. How... by BlitzTech · · Score: 0, Redundant

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

    It's gotta be deliberate. Right?

  3. Is Voting Software Really That Difficult? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Redundant

    Voting software seems simple enough. Is there any reason why it isn't or are the programmers just completely incompetent?

  4. How difficult can it be by guruevi · · Score: 0, Redundant

    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.

    --
    Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
  5. Re:How..... by tangent3 · · Score: -1, Redundant

    Probably the same way using:

    totalVotes[candidate]++;

    screws up.. whereas

    __sync_add_and_fetch(&totalVotes[candidate], 1);

    gets it right.

  6. Re:How hard is it for a computer to do addition? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Redundant

    fall-through ...

  7. How hard... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Redundant

    How fucking hard could counting votes be?!!!!