“IMO the answer is that the values are likely maintained, stored + transferred in DOUBLE PRECISION format ... ultimately you need to accumulate extremely large numbers”
The question is why though ... for counting votes in an election, a 32 bit unsigned value is more than enough to store a headcount ... and that’s just for the overall count of votes received. A 32 bit unsigned value can count up to 4 Billion and some change (I know you know that ... I figure others may not).
It makes absolutely no sense to use double floats for a voting application. In fact, I can’t think of a single reason why you’d even need a float in the entire program unless you wanted to perform some operations on the data.
That kind of code should be nowhere near the core counting/reporting program!
I have long had a problem with everything about ‘Dominion’ ... to start with, working for a startup in the early days of online election systems, we were very sensitive that anything & everything we did was subject to extreme scrutiny. The name of our company was the antithesis of ‘Dominion’ and the business cards were clear plastic to convey transparency. The idea that key individuals would be allowed to publicly exposed as such openly extreme partisans bewilders me. I can also say there is another company in this picture here + now that we had prior experience with and IMO were not above board in all their dealings but they survived & thrived by undercutting bids and things like that & even openly defying the law (nobody cared).