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Bug in ancient e-voting machines impact Belgium election

Belgium is one of the only countries in Europe to still use e-voting machines, and it looks this may be the last election where they use the machines. There's understandably a lot of concern that it's easy to screw up the results from electronic voting, so most countries in Europe have banned their use.

Based on a recent issue, reported by ITWorld, those concerns are very valid. In roughly 20 percent of the "cantons" within the country, old voting machines were not counting the number of votes properly. The hardware, ancient x86 boxes with 1 megabyte of RAM, a parallel port, and two serial ports, is booted with a floppy disk to load the software, and was giving different results throughout the night; It was certified as accurate before the election by PriceWaterhouseCoopers.

The developer, Stesud, has identified a fix for the voting irregularities, but has failed to provide any details as to what the cause of the issue is. That said, the country has determined that voting can resume although we're not sure if we'd trust the results ourselves.

Source: ITWorld | Bug image courtesy of Shutterstock

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