Broward machines count backward

[RBHam]

By Eliot Kleinberg

Palm Beach Post Staff Writer

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.

more...
http://www.palmbeachpost.com/politics/content/news/epaper/2004/11/05/a29a_BROWVOTE_1105.html

[grannylib]

1. OMG....this does not surprise me, but holy crap....thanks for posting and

keep 'em coming!
Send it to Olbermann, send it to Stewart, send it to anyone you can think of!

[leftchick]

2. gee and a Democratic county too....

right? As Greg Palast said, these machines were strategically placed well before election 2004.

[hughee99]

3. This doesn't sound like corruption, it sounds more like incompetence...

The number it probably starts counting down at is 32,768. This would be because the total vote is stored as a 4 byte integer. In binary, the maximum number for an integer of this size is 32,767 or 1111111111111111. When you flip the next bit, all the 1's become 0's and everything gets F'd up. Since you don't know where the machine is going at the time you build it, you don't know whether this value will be enough to record all the votes cast (in a small precint, it wouldn't matter). If the integer is "signed" then the signed bit would get flipped from positive to negative and this could be what causes the issue.

[maxudargo]

4. Yeah, looks like a data typing error

But what a stupid freakin' mistake! And easy to fix, so why wasn't it resolved when it was identified in the earlier election, as the article says it was?

[Kinkistyle]

5. YOU MUST BE SHITTING ME.

They stored the vote counts in WORD INTEGER TYPE?! DID Y2K not JUST FUCKING HAPPEN?

AAARGH! SOMEONE IN AN INTELLIGENT COUNTRY PLEASE LET ME IN!!

[hughee99]

6. I'm not saying it was stored this way,

I don't know what the code looks like, but this would certainly cause it. I wouldn't be suprised if the corrupt were hiring the incompetent.

[KuroKensaki]

10. It is data typing, I'm almost certain

It's almost certainly a data typing problem. The ~32k number and the fact that it began 'counting backwards' is almost a dead giveaway. It's most likely stored in a two-byte signed integer format. This points to coders who are UTTERLY incompetent. For one--two bytes is far too small a number to store all the required votes. For two--to specify a two-byte integer in most languages, you have to specify 'short integer' as the data type, and there would be almost no benefit to using a short integer instead of a regular or long integer. For three--it should be unsigned, because there's no reason a candidate would have negative votes. And for four--there's no reason to be storing a vote count in a variable! The system should be based around a relational database.

The math of the error--
A signed integer (meaning an integer that can be positive or negative) is stored in twos-complement form. Basically, the integer counts normally from 0000000000000000 (0) to 0111111111111 (32767), but when you add another one, it becomes 1000000000000000 (-32768) and begins counting all the way back up to 1111111111111111 (-1). At that point, when you add another 1, it's back to 00000000000000 (0) and the process starts again.
On the other hand, an unsigned integer, one that can only be positive, goes in the logical progression from 0000000000000000 (0) to 1111111111111111 (65535).
Each integer is represented by a certain number of bytes. Some types that are present in most languages, with the maximum value they can store, are one-byte character (255), two-byte short integer (65,535), four-byte integer (4,294,967,295), and eight-byte long integer (18,446,744,073,709,551,616). In this case it's quite obvious that a four-byte unsigned integer would have been the best choice.

[redsoxliberal]

7. ARE YOU SHITTING ME???

Iraq is laughing at us.

[fortyfeetunder]

8. ESS, another Pug operative?

ESS I believe is another Pug run business. This is smelling more like a second illegitimate Presidency.

[greyXstar]

9. oh it's more than 'smelling' my friend...

The more shit that comes out of this, the more obvious it becomes this election was totally screwed. That's 3 elections involving either George or Jeb, and 3 times we've gotten the shaft.