A recount of the votes which led to former vice president Al Gore being elected to Apple's Board of Directors was demanded late Friday afternoon after it was discovered that there were nine votes for Gore, even though there are only six members on Apple's board.
Some are blaming the error on a voting system based on Microsoft Windows.
Jerry
York, president and CEO of Micro Warehouse and also a member of Apple's
board, is the one that discovered the error.
"I was looking at the printout of the results and noticed nine votes for Gore and three votes against him," York said. "But that's 12 votes. We only have six [board members]."
Apple's board used the popular voting software 'Voteview' to tally the votes. The software only runs on Windows. Currently, there are no electronic voting solutions for Mac OS X.
When asked why the board didn't simply say 'Yay' or 'Nay' when making decisions, York responded, "We haven't done that since 1994."
Voteview said in a press release that "Running the Voteview software under certain configurations of Windows 98 may cause a mathematical error in output. To get the true results, simply flip the 'For' and 'Against' numbers and then divide by two."
In the example of Gore being elected to the board, that would mean there were 1.5 votes for Gore and 4.5 votes against, which doesn't make any sense, either.
The voting error calls into question every decision made by Apple's Board of Directors in past 9 years. If Voteview's fix for the error is true, that means every vote made by the board since 1994 was wrong.
Regardless, Gore feels that having a seat on Apple's board is only fitting.
"During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Macintosh," Gore told MacComedy.
To conpensate for the error in Voteview's calculations, York says that board members will now vote for the opposite of whatever they want their vote to be.
|
||
|
Send this article to a friend! |
|
|
