Reply #80: One would hope not - but programs can get complicated real quick

[The Straight Story]

They would have to take into account a large variable of things - like idiotic things people might do, fluctuating candidate information and issues (data which it probably pulls from somewhere, which is itself problematic at times), plus a slew of other things which all interconnect (How is it tabulated, where is data sent, how does it cross check information, etc).

It may be a simple logic subroutine to count the number of votes - but there is always way more to programs than the simple things. I wrote a simple program for a group once to enter some basic information into a form. It went downhill from there. Lots of new checks and balances they wanted, changing data types, and so on lead to mess (until I told them code was froze and changes would have to wait two months...) And all this was, was a simple form where you type in data and submit it to a data base. Then came the new things - validate this, warn on that, report back if they type this or click that - not to mention all the internal tracking I had to do on things within the code.

Simple yes, but a few lines of code can get real long in real world apps where you have to assume the worse and prepare for it in code.