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The RISKS digest[1] has a summary of reported election anomalies in the
latest issue:
<URL: http://catless.ncl.ac.uk/Risks/23.59.html#subj2.1 >
Included is a note about SF's ranked-choice voting problem:
The failure of the ES&S ranked-choice vote-counting software in the San
Francisco Supervisors' election that I noted in RISKS-23.58 turns out to
have been a hard-coded constant maximum number of voters that was set too
low. The fix was utterly trivial, but wisely required recertification by
the State. [Perhaps the same programmer wrote the Broward software?]
Dumb, stupid, and dumb. For the non-geeks, this is a simple and well-known
error to avoid, akin to the Y2K bug of assuming that a two-digit year will
be sufficient. The program broke because too many people voted.
~Chris
[1] The "Forum On Risks To The Public In Computers And Related Systems" of the
Committee on Computers and Public Policy, Association for Computing
Machinery (ACM); see <URL: http://catless.ncl.ac.uk/Risks/ >.
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Christopher R. Maden, Principal Consultant, crism consulting
XML-SGML-HTML-DTDs-schemas-XSL-DSSSL-conversion-training-ebooks-B2B
<URL: http://crism.maden.org/consulting/ >
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