An error in Kerry's favor....

[flowomo]

I've seen a number of posts asking if anyone had seen evidence of a vote-count error in Kerry's favor, and noting that the absence of such errors was a powerful (if circumstantial) indication that systematic cheating had gone on by the Bush camp or its supporters. I was checking out a post made just a few minutes ago regarding the "VotersUnite!" site and did find such an example of an error in Kerry's favor, the first I've seen. For the record, then, and apologies if this has been posted before (who can tell with the flood of posts recently?):

(snip)
"Sometimes the problem is that votes were miscounted. That's what happened, officials say, with precinct-by-precinct results posted on the Orange County elections office Web site showing that Democrat John Kerry beat Republican President Bush by 9,227 votes in Orange.

That was off by 8,400 votes. Officials working for Bill Cowles, the Orange elections supervisor, said the correct totals, available elsewhere on the site, showed that Kerry bested Bush in the county by only 827 votes.

The cause of the error, Orange officials said Thursday, was a software program that could not tabulate more than 32,767 votes in a single precinct. On election night, officials anticipated the problem and adjusted for it, deputy election official Lonn Fluke said Thursday.

But the next day, workers failed to account for the glitch while posting precinct results online. When absentee-ballot totals exceeded the limit in one precinct, the software caused additional votes to be subtracted from Bush's total."

(snip)

The snip is from the Orlando Sentinel, as posted by VotersUnite! here: http://www.votersunite.org/article.asp?id=3803

[Mike Niendorff]

1. Just to be clear:

According to the excerpt you posted:

On election night, officials anticipated the problem and adjusted for it, deputy election official Lonn Fluke said Thursday.

But the next day, workers failed to account for the glitch while posting precinct results online.

The error was in what was posted to their website, not in the actual count that was formally recorded.

However, that being said, I'm astonished that the vote-tabulation code would have used a straight signed integer (and why signed, anyway?) to tabulate precinct-level votes. It HAD to have occurred to someone that at least some precincts were going to exceed 32767 voters (!!!).

Moreover, I REALLY am thinking about the breakdown (party-wise) of large precincts vs. small precincts. Which party is more likely to be hurt by this particular "bug"? And how widespread is it?


MDN

[flowomo]

2. you are correct.....

just noting that a "bad number" in Kerry's favor was made public... and that similar "bad numbers" in Bush's favor are taken by some as evidence of fraud or failure of the voting systems (exit polls?). Better that people know about this case than that they get blindsided by it in a debate -- and possibly have it misrepresented one way or the other.

[jsamuel]

3. WHY OH WHY DIDN'T THEY JUST USE LONG INT's INSTEAD!!!?

Geez, how hard would that have been!!!

[w13rd0]

4. Well...

...my guess is you are talking about sloppy programmers taking advantage of a specific apps proprietary nature to write really crappy code. The code might actually be fun to look at. I'm sure there's a lot there that a quality assurance inspector (a decent one) could make fun of...

[SmallFatCat]

5. Maybe they were using excel?

Sound's strange, but they might have 2 records per vote, and imported it into Excel to sum them up.

I know it sounds strange, but it wouldn't suprise me.

Still more explicable than using a signed int though, next election they'll be using complex numbers in their calculations and the electoral map will look like a fractal :P

[Eloriel]

6. They ANTICIPATED the problem and "adjusted" for it?

Unbelievable.

I'm sorry, AFAIC, their explanation is bogus. Or at least it's certainly something I'd like to see audited SERIOUSLY. This is the kind of doublspeak kind of "explanations" that raise more questions than they answer, and point to even MORE serious problems than we already know about.

What on earth kind of election board would allow people to vote on such a machine?