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2004 US Presidential Election
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November 06, 2004
Irregularities | "Broward [County FL] machines count backward"

FORT LAUDERDALE - 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…

Note: That sounds like it might be a “short vs. long” issue. Without going into too much detail, a “short” can only represent a much more limited range of numbers than a “long.” A “signed” short or long uses the same bits to represent both positive and negative numbers. This post from over 12 years ago describes the difference and suggest using longs except when memory is critical or otherwise dictated. While there are certainly situations in which using a short would be advisable, this wouldn’t appear to be one of them. If the wraparound is indeed because a short was used where a long would be advised, this is clearly a major error resulting from very poor design, very poor coding, a major uncaught bug, or something else.

If this is a database column, it’s clearly a very major design error.

Otherwise, it could be a casting /conversion problem or an arithmetic error or a transmission problem or something else. One would think this bug would have been caught the first time they tested to see if the machine could handle a large number of votes, if they did indeed test that.



Posted by Lonewacko at November 6, 2004 01:47 PM | TrackBack
Comments

They should have used Smalltalk, which avoids all three issues: size constraint by type is dealt with using autocoercion to a larger type, sign issues are also handled with autocoercion, and casting is not needed since Smalltalk is a strongly typed system with late-binding. Dittto for the Arianne rocket mishap. See www.squeak.org for an open source Smalltalk system.

Posted by: metamorph [TypeKey Profile Page] at November 6, 2004 10:07 PM

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