Calling it a “mini-Y2K,” this article alerts is to some issues associated with this year’s early start date of daylight savings time.
…it’s a potential problem in any software that was programmed before a 2005 law decreed that daylight-saving time would start three weeks earlier and end one week later, beginning this year.
[…]
Software created earlier is set to automatically advance its timekeeping by one hour on the first Sunday in April, not the second Sunday in March (that’s March 11 this year).
Best bet is to get your software updated now. And if you live by your calendar, as I do, get ready to verbally confirm your appointments.
VIVIAN J. PAIGE | All Politics is Local 
Fortunately, the fall return to Standard will happen on the Sunday before the first Tuesday in November for the next three years, so none of those lovely Windows-based voting machines will be affected until 2010. That should be enough time even for Diebold to come up with a fix, right? 🙂
A followup for those of you who don’t realize the impact this can have on elections:
In 2003 Sherry White-Battle, independent candidate for Norfolk Clerk of Court, filed several state and federal lawsuits against a number of parties claiming election fraud and civil rights violations. One charge she made repeatedly was that a number of polls in Norfolk had closed at 4 PM, thus depriving her of votes.
It turned out that quite a few Diebold voting machines, which are Windows XP-based, still had their system clocks set to the Windows default time zone, which is Pacific. As a result, the register tapes in a number of precincts showed the polls opening at 3 AM and closing at 4 PM.
This explanation was presented in court and the particular charge was dismissed each time it came up. However, it does show the importance of guaranteeing that computer voting machines have the right time set.
Yeah, I remember that incident well 😉
Folks are not going to pay attention to this until it happens. And then they are going to have a mess.