Broward machines count backward? Palm Beach Post article-READS Fraud!

[FrenchieCat]

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/epap ...

[LilKim]

1. 32,000? Excuse me for talking geek (and pasting my reply from another

thread) but I'm guessing they meant 32,767. It sounds like the programmer was using only a two byte signed integer for storing vote totals which is pretty bone headed. Storing a number larger than 32,767 in such variables can cause them to flip negative.

[RogueTrooper]

6. Or was it evil geius covering itself as stupidity

I am a programmer too and that is just a little too convientently incompetent.

[LilKim]

8. I dunno, I've worked with a number of Visual Basic programmers and

I've seen a lot of marginally competent and some downright incompetent coders. Anyone who's primary programming background is in high level applications work is essentially clueless when it comes to the subtleties and limitations of signed integers. Right now I'm working with some real estate data and in this day and age I find it positively mind boggling that whoever wrote the data entry interface didn't have enough sense to have a function to copy the property address to the owner address (since they're nearly always the same) and instead forces the user to retype it in, furthering any chance of typos.

[bemildred]

9. You are right.

Two byte signed int is the first thing to check, and most
applications programmers will not have much of a clue about
such issues. Incompetence is the norm.

IIRC they run these on XP using Excel, so it's a clueless
development environment.

One should look for numbers to go up to 32767 and then to -32768 and
count up towards -1.

[writes2000]

2. The Link Isn't Working....

Can you try again?

I need to read the whole story.

[Contrary1]

3. Try this one:

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

[AnIndependentTexan]

5. keep this kicked

[FrenchieCat]

4. Just tried looking for it and

Thanks ....Contrary 1

[AnIndependentTexan]

7. Also here is some important information

Here is how they cheated by E-machines votes PAY ATTENION

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=132&topic_id=1318200&mesg_id=1318200&page=

Stock symbol of Diebold - DBD and history

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=132&topic_id=1319721#1319974

saw this on another forum

Diebold used the old underhanded ATM trick.....Negative vote count aka negative numbers when doing a withdrawl.....So easy to do, it actually reverses the percentages immediately, making it seem like no fraud could happen!

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=132&topic_id=1314823&mesg_id=1314823&page=

[Lex]

10. It is heartbreaking.

Either incompetence or illegality could very well be depriving this country of its elected leader.

But who can we turn to in order to have all these things investigated in a proper way?