For election officials in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, November 2
had passed with merciful ease. The balloting was deemed an
administrative success -- until two days later, that is, when
election workers noticed a mathematical oddity: As they
canvassed more votes, the tallies in certain races had
decreased. After some hand-wringing, election officials
discovered that the Election Systems & Software (ES&S) machines
used by Broward County to count absentee ballots were
inexplicably programmed to subtract votes once the 16-bit
devices hit a ceiling of 32,767 votes. According to Rebecca
Mercuri, a computer-security expert at Harvard's Radcliffe
Institute for Advanced Study, this mistake was a common error
made by “dumb freshman computer-science majors” and other
neophyte programmers. In this case, ES&S had known about the
problem for at least two years, but neither the company nor
state or local election officials had aggressively sought to
correct it. In a statement to Florida newspapers shortly after
the election,