Electronic Voting

[Jason Stokes]

Martijn van Oosterhout wrote:
> 
> Does anyone know what caused the hiccup in the electronic counting early on?

Well,  if you were listening to the ABC radio coverage, you would have
heard that they were getting a lot of problems querying results. 
Subsequently the election technical support people shut off the web
server serving results to the public, which sped everything up for
everyone on the tally room floor.  I can confirm that the web server was
initially churning with a stalled connection whenever you tried to get
the election summary results, and later, you would get a "500 internal
server error" clicking on 
http://www1.elections.act.gov.au/cgi-bin/party_by_electorate after the
ABC reported the web server was shut down.

I'd say election results were being served by a cgi-bin script that did
a separate query of the server hosting the election database every time
a user requested the election summary.  Because there was no caching of
queries or other optimisations, this slowed the election database server
to a crawl for everyone, including the people on the tally room who were
actually trying to get on with the count.  Either that or both
applications were being hosted on the same machine (or both), which
would surely be a bit risky...