Date: Tue, 7 Apr 1992 12:38:29 GMT
From: weberwu@inf.fu-berlin.de (Debora Weber-Wulff)
Subject: Rounding error changes Parliament makeup
We experienced a shattering computer error during a German election this past Sunday (5 April). The elections to the parliament for the state of Schleswig-Holstein were affected.
German elections are quite complicated to calculate. First, there is the 5% clause: no party with less than 5% of the vote may be seated in parliament. All the votes for this party are lost. Seats are distributed by direct vote and by list. All persons winning a precinct vote (i.e. having more votes than any other candidate in the precinct) are seated. Then a complicated system (often D'Hondt, now they have newer systems) is invoked that seats persons from the party lists according to the proportion of the votes for each party. Often quite a number of extra seats (and office space and salaries) are necessary so that the seat distribution reflects the vote percentages each party got.
On Sunday the votes were being counted, and it looked like the Green party was hanging on by their teeth to a vote percentage of exactly 5%. This meant that the Social Democrats (SPD) could not have anyone from their list seated, which was most unfortunate, as the candidate for minister president was number one on the list, and the SPD won all precincts: no extra seats needed.
After midnight (and after the election results were published) someone discovered that the Greens actually only had 4,97% of the vote. The program that prints out the percentages only uses one place after the decimal, and had *rounded the count up* to 5%! This software had been used for *years*, and no one had thought to turn off the rounding at this very critical (and IMHO very undemocratic) region!
So 4,97% of the votes were thrown away, the seats were recalculated, the SPD got to seat one person from the list, and now have a one seat majority in the parliament. And the newspapers are clucking about the "computers" making such a mistake.
Debora Weber-Wulff, Institut fuer Informatik, Nestorstr. 8-9,
D-W-1000 Berlin 31 dww@inf.fu-berlin.de +49 30 89691 124