Here's a QA nightmare: for the past ten
years the voting machines made by Premier Election Solutions (formerly Diebold)
have had a bug in their software that causes votes to be dropped. According to
an
article in the Washington Post the problem occurs when votes are
transferred from a memory card to a central tallying server and, as Premier
officials note, inconsistencies are caught only when (if?) cross-checking is
done by elections officials as part of the results certification process. The
most notable state affected by this bug is of course a hotly contested one --
Ohio.
Due to the fact that elections systems changes must be certified by the Fed, it could take two years or more to get the issue resolved. In the meantime it will be considered a 'known issue', and presumably elections officials will be notified and advised of the problem.
The kick of the story though is that Premier first declared the issue human error. Then recanted and blamed it on Antivirus software. And then, as Dan Goodin of The Register puts it... finally 'confessed' to a logic error.
