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Bug In DOS-Based Voting Machines Disrupts Belgian Election

Posted by samzenpus on from the slowing-things-down dept.

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."

4 of 193 comments (clear)

  1. They almost made it, too by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

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

  2. Paltry by wiredlogic · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

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  3. Paper trail by ArcadeMan · · Score: 5, Insightful

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

    Why mess with electronic voting?

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  4. a number af factual errors in the original article by joris.w · · Score: 5, Informative

    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