Bug In DOS-Based Voting Machines Disrupts Belgian Election

jfruh (300774) writes "In 20 cantons in Belgium's Flanders region, voting machines are x86 PCs from the DOS era, with two serial ports, a parallel port, a paltry 1 megabyte of RAM and a 3.5-inch disk drive used to load the voting software from a bootable DOS disk. A software bug in those machines is slowing the release of the results from yesterday's election, in which voters chose members of the regional, national, and European parliaments. The remaining voting machines, which are Linux-based, are unaffected, as were voters in the French-speaking Wallonia region of the country, most of whom use paper ballots."

Comments

They almost made it, too

[Anonymous Coward]

They were just about to upgrade to Windows XP for the next election.

It's a software bug, hardware unrelated

[mechtech256]

A graphing calculator would probable have adequate power to handle taking votes. If the DOS machines are meeting the specifications required for Flanders elections, there's not much of a reason to upgrade them.

I guess I'm just not seeing the story here. Linux wouldn't stop a software bug either. I guess the only hassle here is that they might have to dig out the parallel cables to patch the machines.

Re:It's a software bug, hardware unrelated

[Hsien-Ko]

I guess their next 'logical' step is to upgrade to Windows XP


and then use the same software in the DOSBox emulator

and then complain on the DOSBox forum that it doesn't work, among the sea of other overentitled 'IT pros' that demand a gaming emulator to fit critical application usage
*facepalm*

Paltry

[wiredlogic]

The problem wasn't on the voting machines with the "paltry" amount of memory:

After the elections are over the results are loaded on a 3.5-inch floppy disk and shipped to the canton headquarters where the disks are fed into another computer that adds up the votes before sending the results to the ministry. It was there that the problem occurred, the spokesman said, adding that the votes that ended up on the disks were correct.

There is nothing wrong with a simple dedicated system that is based on proven hardware. Most of the computers in use today have even less than 1MiB at their disposal. It is a fallacy of thought that you have to have an extensive operating system with virtual memory and other elaborate support systems to accomplish a simple task.

Re:Paltry

[bruce_the_loon]

South Africa just did it that way and it works well. First you count the total ballots, still folded, then you count the votes and that way nobody can add other ballots in during the vote tally to make up numbers. No cellphones etc allowed in the hands of the counters, elections officials or party observers during the count.

Got one addition to the process that we don't do. No results should be released from a polling station until every single station has finished counting and certified within the station. Forget this running TV tally and all that crap, if the numbers in each station remain secret until all stations are ready to report, then you can reduce the risk of "finding" additional votes in the trunk of a car.

Obligatory

[ArcadeMan]

Stupid Flanders.

Paper trail

[ArcadeMan]

In Canada, we use paper voting and we usually know the results of national elections within 24 hours.

Why mess with electronic voting?

Re:Paper trail

[cpghost]

24 hours is quite a long time actually. In Germany, we use paper voting too, and the (final) results are usually available within 2-3 hours, 4 hours at most.

Incorrect story

[Anonymous Coward]

While it is true that most of Wallonia votes with paper, all the places using e-vote in Wallonia and in Brussel are "affected" by the bug as well.

"affected" with marks, as the actual problem happened with the software in charge of centralizing all the votes coming from these places. So the e-vote process had no actual problem, it's the counting afterwards that crashed.

source: I live in Belgium, it's been all over the news here. I'll also add that I heard exactly zero reports about the same problem occuring in Flanders, but I might have overlooked some reports.

disclaimer: I strongly oppose e-vote.

a number af factual errors in the original article

[joris.w]

for a more accurate account of the facts, you could read http://datanews.knack.be/ict/n... (in dutch)
the vote counting problem in Flanders was related to manual procedures in the Ghent area
the DOS based e-voting system is used in Brussels, not Flanders
as stated already in other comments: the DOS based systems did not fail, it was the central vote collecting system that failed
lesson learned: If you want accurate reports, go to the source and don't rely on second hand reports