Defective software 'lost' votes

[salvorhardin]

{Sorry if this a dupe. Search is offline. I scanned but didn't see it.}

<snip>
Defective software 'lost' votes

By ERIKA BOLSTAD

[email protected]

Thousands of new votes on some constitutional amendment questions were discovered early Thursday, potentially forcing a recount on the question of a South Florida vote on slot machines.

As absentee ballot counting wound down after midnight in Broward County's elections warehouse, attorneys scrutinizing the close vote on Amendment Four noticed that vote totals changed in an unexpected way after 13,000 final ballots were counted.

Election officials quickly determined the problem was caused by the Unity Software that pulls together votes from five machines tabulating absentee ballots.

Because no precinct has more than 32,000 voters, the software caps the total votes at that number. From there, it begins to count backward.

Really.
</snip>

http://www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald/10099198.htm?1c

[Kimber Scott]

1. I wonder if it would be better not to know this stuff. Feelings of help-

lessness lead to drastic reactions.

[salvorhardin]

6. Knowledge is power

I'll feel helpless if after all this information comes out (and I believe Bev Harris and crew are going to turn up a boat load) and nothing comes of it.

I personally have a stake in knowing all these voting inconsistencies caused by the machines. I live in a rural upstate NY county that has been voting on the good old-fashioned mechanical lever machines since before I was born (at least since the 1950s). However, courtesy of HAVA and the brain-dead conservative republicans that dominate county politics we'll be getting these new-fangled (un)voting machines next year. Not sure which flavor (Diebold, ES&S, Seqouia or what), but it doesn't matter because they're all bad ideas from the get-go with programming that would get a first year comp. sci. student thrown out of their department.

Hopefully, cold hard facts such as these might, just might, sway the country reps and allow me to continute voting on the same old reliable accurate machine I've been using since I was 18 and that my parents used before me.

[bettyellen]

10. here here... this is most important!

[crispini]

14. I just had a thought.

Tomorrow, I'm going to go through ALL of the stories that have been posted so far about BBV in this election and print them out and create a folder or scrapbook.

I think it will make a nice fat folder to plop down on our election adminstrator's desk.

And... don't trust those mechanicals too much though -- the problem with them is human error. Crack open the back, read a 854, swap a couple of digits when you write them down and you get 458.

[KingChicken]

2. We need to support all re-count efforts to expose problems

If we don't face the voter fraud issues this time around then we will be dealing with the same amount of uncertainty next time around. If there is fraud it must be exposed!

[Mr_Spock]

4. I agree

And I don't care what comes from this effort. What could be worse than four years of Satan?

[daleo]

3. There was no excuse to give up

Kerry should have never given up. Damn it, we needed an RFK or a Churchill, and we did not get either.

[proReality]

5. Kerry said words to the effect that he didn't want to put us through it...

with his early concession, I guess he meant he didn't want to put us through the rigors of democracy. It has left me feeling totally betrayed.

[daleo]

8. My mom lived through the blitz

She knew that sometimes you fight your way through to the truth.

[WannaJumpMyScooter]

13. Put us through what, exactly?

What kind of phone call did he get from the ** gang? Conceed or we will nuke Boston. Kill his daughters?

I wonder.

[bhikkhu]

7. So the implication is...

Some precincts, or at least one, counted more votes than there were voters. And we only know this because of a screwy bit of software. Why am I not surprised.

[salvorhardin]

9. This came from Slashdot

but now the Slashdot story has disappeared. Oh well, I copied the text of one particularly salient post before it disappeared.

Re:Happened in florida (Score:1)
by dtfinch (661405) * Alter Relationship on 12:00 AM November 5th, 2004 (#10731984)
(http://www.mytsoftware.com/dailyproject/)
This begs a much bigger question:

How in the hell did one voting machine take over 32000 votes? Suppose they had a 16 hour window to vote, that would mean it averaged less than 2 seconds per vote.

Also, (short)32767+1=-32768. They shouldn't see it count backwards unless it displayed the absolute value in addition. Did the programmer for some silly reason anticipate negative values and stick an abs() in there? Or did they reinvent some wheels and write their own itoa()? No matter how it happened, wow, what amazing stupidity and/or malice.

[Spangle]

11. Remember Volusa county in 2000???

"From there, it begins to count backward."

Pretty much sounds like what they were dealing with to make Gore end up with -19,000+ votes in the red.

[salvorhardin]

12. Yes. Problem 2 years old.

From the article:

The glitch was discovered two years ago, and should have been corrected by software manufacturer ES&S of Omaha, Neb., according to Broward County Mayor Ilene Lieberman.