sizeof( short ) 

There are a lot of different rumors floating around about how Bush stole another election. I'm not going to discuss them because they are really the talk of tin foil hat wearing folks. Instead I will approach part of this from a geek's perspective. This Wired article goes over those myths pretty thoroughly. However, while reading this article on debunking those rumors, I finally saw a more detailed explanation for one of the electronic voting machine problems in Florida:

CLAIM: Touch screen machines in Broward County started "counting backwards."

No, they didn't. The voting machines in the precincts worked fine.

Broward's central vote-counter was not programmed to expect more than 32,000 votes in any single precinct.

With the limit exceeded, the running totals in four races (all constitutional amendments) did, indeed, start declining.

Observers quickly noticed it. It got fixed. The accuracy of the individual voting machines was never in question. Nobody's vote was a "negative" that subtracted from the vote totals.

32,000? I'm sure those of you non-geeks out there are probably thinking "What an arbitrary number". Actually the number isn't 32,000... it would be 32,768. Huh? That's even stranger Nick. Actually it's not. In computer parlance, that's the size of a two byte signed integer (called a short). In other words, that's the largest number that can be held in two bytes of memory if you assume negative numbers are possible. It is equal to 2 to the power of 15 (the 16^th bit represents positive or negative). When you run past that maximum size, one of two things will occur depending on you the environment. Either an exception gets thrown and you get an ugly error box (which it sounds like never happened), or it overflows, setting the "sign bit" making the number negative. Sounds like that's what happened.

I have a couple of questions for the programmers of those touch screen voting systems. First of all, why would you use a signed integer? Votes can never be negative, so why not make it unsigned? Two things happen when you do this. First of all you instantly double the number of votes those same two bytes can represent, to 65,536. The second is you reduce your chance of error by one less possibility.

My second question is, why a two byte integer? Now then, I have no idea what operating system this uses, or how what kind of hardware we're talking about. But memory is cheap. Spring for a 4 byte integer guys (4,294,967,296 unsigned). I know. Even better... use a god damn long, which is 8 bytes (18,446,744,073,709,551,616 unsigned). The primary job of this machine is to count! Why on Earth would you try to short change the ability of this machine to do the one thing it's intended to do? You're telling me that out of the megabytes of memory that I guarantee this piece of hardware has available, you couldn't find a measly 2 or 6 more bytes somewhere to use?