Posted on 11/05/2004 7:47:45 PM PST by RogerWilko
Friday, November 05, 2004
FORT LAUDERDALE — It had to happen. Things were just going too smoothly.
Early Thursday, as Broward County elections officials wrapped up after a long day of canvassing votes, something unusual caught their eye. Tallies should go up as more votes are counted. That's simple math. But in some races, the numbers had gone . . . down.
Officials found the software used in Broward can handle only 32,000 votes per precinct. After that, the system starts counting backward.
Why a voting system would be designed to count backward was a mystery to Broward County Mayor Ilene Lieberman. She was on the phone late Wednesday with Omaha-based Elections Systems and Software.
Bad numbers showed up only in running tallies through the day, not the final one. Final tallies were reached by cross-checking machine totals, and officials are confident they are accurate.
The glitch affected only the 97,434 absentee ballots, Broward Elections Supervisor Brenda Snipes said. All were placed in their own precincts and optical scanners totaled votes, which were then fed to a main computer.
That's where the counting problems surfaced. They affected only votes for constitutional amendments 4 through 8, because they were on the only page that was exactly the same on all county absentee ballots. The same software is used in Martin and Miami-Dade counties; Palm Beach and St. Lucie counties use different companies.
The problem cropped up in the 2002 election. Lieberman said ES&S told her it had sent software upgrades to the Florida Secretary of State's office, but that the office kept rejecting the software. The state said that's not true. Broward elections officials said they had thought the problem was fixed.
Secretary of State spokeswoman Jenny Nash said all counties using this system had been told that such problems would occur if a precinct is set up in a way that would allow votes to get above 32,000. She said Broward should have split the absentee ballots into four separate precincts to avoid that and that a Broward elections employee since has admitted to not doing that.
But Lieberman said later, "No election employee has come to the canvassing board and made the statements that Jenny Nash said occurred."
Late Thursday, ES&S issued a statement reiterating that it learned of the problems in 2002 and said the software upgrades would be submitted to Hood's office next year. The company was working with the counties it serves to make sure ballots don't exceed capacity and said no other counties reported similar problems.
"While the county bears the ultimate responsibility for programming the ballot and structuring the precincts, we . . . regret any confusion the discrepancy in early vote totals has caused," the statement said.
After several calls to the company during the day were not returned, an ES&S spokeswoman said late Thursday she did not know whether ES&S contacted the secretary of state two years ago or whether the software is designed to count backward.
While the problem surfaced two years ago, it was under a different Broward elections supervisor and a different secretary of state. Snipes said she had not known about the 2002 snafu.
Later, Lieberman said, "I am not passing judgments and I'm not pointing a finger." But she said that if ES&S is found to be at fault, actions might include penalizing ES&S or even defaulting on its contract.
Broward is a Dem County, so it was probably linux. :)
Yup, and the reporters can't handle numbers like 32,767, either!
Bev Harris runs http://www.blackboxvoting.org/ and is sort of an "authority" on the problems with electronic voting machines. Apparently she's gotten herself a lot of publicity, including an appearance on Lou Dobbs.
She's also a DUmmy and is right now engaged in a Super Top Secret Project to obtain voting machine audit data from 3,000 precincts around the country, using FOIA requests.
Today she posted a Secret Update (shhh, don't tell anyone) and her fellow DUmmies responded with heartfelt thanks. They think she's gonna' break the election.
It's completely unclear why they think it would break for Kerry.
AMEN Brother!
SHEESHH. The one good thing about my county is that they use a very easy to use ballot form. You bubble the ballot in. That's all. No big deal.
** DEFINITION OF THE DEMOCRAT VOTING MACHINE OPERATION **
(1) DEMOCRAT VOTE: ADD TWO VOTES
(2) REPUBLICAN VOTE: SUBTRACT ONE VOTE
(3) INDEPENDENT VOTE: DO NOTHING
---- aint it the truth - put nothing past these crooks!!!
this is SO MESSED UP !!
I voted using a PUNCH CARD SYSTEM - butterfly ballot.
Worked FINE. I wasnt 'bamboozled' by it.
WHY were electronic voting machines approved ?
WHY on GOD's GREEN EARTH wasnt I required to show my
Drivers licence, or I.D. ??
This really is messed up.
eh?
Check out this post from one of their fine teachers I found whilst surfing the DUmpster:
schoolteacherpam (1000+ posts)
Wed Nov-03-04 11:47 AM
Original message
okay you stupid motherf*kers that voted for bush don't come crying
when you lose your health care your overtime that you were going to use for Christmas your civil liberties and your kids get killed you deserve it all you dumb motherf*kers
YEAAAA for Lie-Beral Teachers!!
With teachers like this, no wonder the DUmmies are brainwashed beyond repair!! HOLY CRAP!!
I'll tell you in technical terms. They used what in computer terms is called a "16-bit signed integer" instead of a floating point decimal or double integer to sum the totals. Computers can only recognize 1's and 0's (a "bit") and programmers recognized the need for computers to use negative numbers, so they decided to use the first bit in a 16 bit to designate the sign of the number, a 0 means the number is positive, a 1 means the number is negative.
A 16-bit signed integer counts from 0 to 32,767 by using just 0's and 1's like this 0000 0000 0000 0000 = +0, 0000 0000 0000 0001 = +1, 0000 0000 0000 0011 = +2, and so on until 0111 1111 1111 1111 = +32,767. The very next number is 1000 0000 0000 0000 and instead of +32,768, the number represents -0 and 1000 0000 0000 0001 = -1.
The computer just continued adding NEGATIVE numbers to the total, thinking it was dealing with an unsigned integer or a floating point decimal or a double integer (two 16-bit words that are treated as one 32-bit word).
Very stupid mistake.
Yeah, you would have thought all the worry over the year 2000 would have been fresh in their minds.
Fellow computer heads, I see (although my programming is limited to industrial HMI's and PLC's). (See post #30)
Could be worse. Could have been MacOS. The BSD is short for BERKELEY Software Development. ; )
Modern programmer.(college student hired off the street)
It sounds to me like the number just wrapped.
2 byte ints. Guess they thought no precinct would ever be this large. Are they using core memory strung by seamstresses or sumfn?
We love it!
32767
Watch It, Watch It.
We're not all "Duh" here.
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