To Really Screw Up An Election Count, Add Computers…

30Apr/117

To Really Screw Up An Election Count, Add Computers…

....and dumb people who don't know how to properly set up systems or check their errors.

While the Wisconsin recount slowly grinds on, I bring you two stories courtesy my membership in the European Spreadsheet Risks Interest Group (these stories don't seem to rise to the level of our horror stories, though.)

First, out of Waukesha, we have "Kathy's special program":

Waukesha County Clerk Kathy Nickolaus was using a software program created especially for her by the state Government Accountability Board when she made the huge error in compiling results for the State Supreme Court race between incumbent David Prosser and challenger JoAnne Kloppenburg. The special program was revealed in an email sent to other county clerks and released by the Kloppenburg campaign to buttress her claim that an independent investigation of Nickolaus’ office is needed.
....
The email, by Rusk County Clerk Denise Wetzel and addressed to other county clerks in Wisconsin, including Nickolaus, was sent on April 8, the day after Nickolaus revealed the vote-reporting error in a press conference.

It reads, “Please note that the program Kathy uses IS NOT the new canvass reporting program that is in the (Statewide Voter Registration System) that we all have been using as of late. It is a completely different program that was created by GAB for Kathy to accumulate her votes prior to uploading them into the program that the rest of us use.”
....
“We ran this for the governor’s election,” she said, “and we ran the same system for the February election. We had no problems.”

Under the system, Nickolaus said municipalities, including Brookfield, are given a template spreadsheet to fill in with election results and email back to her. Municipalities are instructed not to alter the spreadsheet – but on the night of April 5, when Brookfield returned its form to Nickolaus, she noticed it contained “extra columns,” complicating the process of importing it into the database.

The clerk said she called staff in Brookfield to again stress the importance of not altering the template.

Nickolaus, however, didn’t say this complication was the cause of Brookfield’s vote totals being omitted from the initial results released by her office.

Hey, blame an intern. That's what most cubicle warriors do.

But yeah, giving people a data entry template you're going to use to import into your huge database.... WELL DAMMIT YOU WRITE YOUR QUERIES TO CHECK THE FUCKING COLUMN COUNT AND HEADERS.

So somebody accidentally hit "insert column", just to the left of the vote count column, I bet. It would've been an empty column. Oh, I don't know - having data checks before entering them into your database is pretty standard.

Thing is, Kathy isn't a tech person. Indeed, it shouldn't require a tech person to run an election. AND IT DIDN'T - because Althouse is also not a tech person, and she noticed that there was a problem with the magnitude of the numbers being reported.

WHAT IT REQUIRES IS SOME FUCKING COMMON SENSE.

I think the Kloppenburg campaign would have a point of saying "You really shouldn't have someone dumb as a brick running your elections".... but they're not the most credible people to be doing this.

Let's move on, shall we?

Sure, here's another spreadsheet error in an election, this time in West Virginia (and to no effect):

Morgantown City Clerk Linda Little said a computer error led to a discrepancy in vote totals for council candidate George Papandreas.

The candidate -- who was defeated by incumbent Ron Bane -- actually received 99 more votes than was originally indicated in the total listed on the city's unofficial results.
....
Little said election officials had put the total number of votes for each precinct into a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet. The computer program skipped over an entry when it added the totals, she said.

I think they're trying to make this sound more complicated than it probably was. I bet somebody manually put in a =SUM(:) function, and either forgot to include the first or the last row. That's all. That's not a computer error -- that's a human error.

In both of these cases, the error was with the human, as it usually is.

For those who are interested in preventing some basic errors like these (and how to check), I recommend Patrick O'Beirne's Spreadsheet Check and Control. Also, I have a paper at the Society of Actuaries that can be useful for non-actuaries: Spreadsheet Issues: Pitfalls, Best Practices, and Practical Tips(PDF).

Common sense can be trained up, to a certain degree.

Sheer stupidity, well, can't do much about that but pray for wisdom....

Meep

Meep is a member of the Irish Catholic mafia, having a suspiciously high number of green-eyed, red-haired friends. While she doesn’t have red hair herself [except when she goes into the sun (rare for any vampire)], she does have green eyes. She’s a raving Papist and is a life actuary on the side [i.e., she counts dead people]. An amateur pain-in-the-ass [willing to go pro!], she likes covering retirement, mortality, math, and education issues.

Tagged as: computers, Elections, spreadsheets Leave a comment

Comments (7) Trackbacks (1) ( subscribe to comments on this post )

vaguely
April 30th, 2011 - 09:00

WHAT IT REQUIRES IS SOME FUCKING COMMON SENSE.

Well, froget it then.

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- Meep
  April 30th, 2011 - 11:03
  
  surely =somebody= in Waukesha can fill the bill….
  
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Bob Reed
April 30th, 2011 - 11:49

The amusing thing is that across the spectrum, computer error is often substituted for what really is operating error. It used to happen in the aviation community as well; arrive on station late? Well, it was surely the navigation equipment, and not the fact that making a wrong turn at Albuquerque when travelling at 550+ mph can take you pretty far out of the way pretty quickly.

Have a bad day with the gunnery drone? Well surely it was my acquisition and targeting equipment, because hotshots never have a bad day, amirite?

Blaming on the machine ensures that no person has to take the heat; it’s just another “intern” to throw under the bus :)

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jefferson101
April 30th, 2011 - 17:40

Finally, an “accountant” type issue that makes sense to me.

I get to do spreadsheet type stuff on occasion. It’s usually related to doing statistics on something, but once in a while I get drafted to do scrap reports or suchlike when the designated victim is out of pocket for a day or two.

And I can tell you that the problem is pretty much always a loose nut on the keyboard. I’ve done things like that about twice myself, but it doesn’t happen very often, because I get to hear about what everyone else screwed up with the reports about twice a week. Spreadsheets are very unforgiving of clicks in the wrong place.

OTOH, I’d offer that when you have someone who is not a professional Excel user doing that sort of thing? It’s going to happen. We have a couple of people who do it regularly and are good at it. When they put on the amateur hour, you got to expect it.

How many County Clerks spend enough of their time working with spreadsheets to be really good at it? Not a lot, would be my prediction. Mostly they hire someone to do it.

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- Meep
  May 1st, 2011 - 08:22
  
  part of the issue, though, is you have a bunch of “numbers are maaaaaaaaagic” people who are on the receiving end of the results.
  
  yes, it helps to have spreadsheet experts (being one myself, I like doing this work, and I can get good money doing it).
  
  BUT – all it takes is someone looking at the result and say “Hey, I think we’re missing tens of thousands of votes….” You need someone with a gut feel of where things should be ending up, and then investigating when something looks odd.
  
  The second error was more invisible, given that the 99 votes missed were on the order of a round-off error (the total votes were over 1000, I believe – so this was on the order of a 1% error, which is pretty common, and hard to detect using common sense alone.)
  
  The Waukesha error was HYUGE. Orders of magnitude huge.
  
  I deal with those sorts of errors all the time. In my prior job, I’d have a direct report giving me a result that was off by =millions= of dollars… uh, yeah, I noticed that stuff. And then she’d catch an error that hit the bottom line to the tune of 10K. Seriously? That’s well below “material impact”.
  
  It’s always so pleasant to see “material impact” threshholds set at well above one’s annual salary.
  
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  - Bob Reed
    May 1st, 2011 - 10:49
    
    part of the issue, though, is you have a bunch of “numbers are maaaaaaaaagic” people who are on the receiving end of the results.
    
    Astoundingly, this is become more of a problem as an increasing number of folks are involved in numerical analyses of all kinds, often using spreadsheets, that are not only unfamiliar and marginally competent with the software, but really don’t understand the mathematics and/or physical concepts behind the numbers they’re crunching !
    
    I’ve seen people pointing to insignifigant “noise” in their “analysis” as being indicitive of some underlying unknown that needs more scrutiny, without realizing that it’s just junk left over from the computational process!
    
    It’s astonishing to someone like myself, who generally tended to develop closed form expressions, at least as much as possible, in order to get stuff to algebraically “drop out” and reduce variables and concomitant sources of error.
    
    Computers and software are supposed to be tools. Nobody thinks a dolt with a hammer can build a house; why assume that someone with little understanding of the capablilities/limitations of software and the mathematics in play should be able to keep from being a fly in the ointment.
    
    At bare minimum they should have someone like yourself providing a kind of macro “checksum” on the submissions of the less-than-knowledgable underlings. Or instead of using excel-based forms, use purpose-driven-custom software that only provides fields for data entry and sends that data to a central location for crunching…
    
    My Regards
    
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    - Meep
      May 1st, 2011 - 13:17
      
      All I’m going to say is that the one time I was given fair warning that one of my spreadsheets was going to be given to the sales staff to use for pricing, I locked that baby down and error-checked/stupidity-checked it as much as I could before sending it along (and, of course, somebody else wrote up the training manual…. which nobody read. Good thing I knew that would happen, so I designed it so that one wouldn’t need a manual.)
      
      Holy crap, the scariest moment in my life was when I got a phone call from Denver complaining that a spreadsheet of mine didn’t work. My response: “Who are you, and how did you get that spreadsheet?”
      
      I had written that spreadsheet to be used only by a few actuaries in NY. I never got to bitch out the guy who released that one into the wild, but I should have.
      
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