Wow. Wild story. Thanks for sharing. Cool twist that a bug ended up identifying the bad guys.
The drama in trying to convert election PDFs to Spreadsheets
121–130 of 148 posts
Re: The drama in trying to convert election PDFs to Spreadsheets
#122Oh, and Mark didn't mention that Bola Ahmed Tinubu was indicted for heroin charges in the US in 2003, forfeited $460k & is just too old to run a democracy this size. Atiku Abubakar (second candidate) was a former VP and the president he served under (Obasanjo) still insists the dude remains a monument to corruption. There's been a coordinated campaign at all levels to rig this election massively and we saw voter inti…
> is just too old to run a democracy this size.
Bola Ahmed Tinubu was born 29 March 1952. He is 70.
Joe Biden was Born November 20, 1942. He is 80.
There are plenty of world leaders that are old and I completely agree with you. Why aren’t there upper age limits? The UK House of Lords, US Congress and US Supreme Court have this problem too.
Re: The drama in trying to convert election PDFs to Spreadsheets
#123Oh, and Mark didn't mention that Bola Ahmed Tinubu was indicted for heroin charges in the US in 2003, forfeited $460k & is just too old to run a democracy this size. Atiku Abubakar (second candidate) was a former VP and the president he served under (Obasanjo) still insists the dude remains a monument to corruption. There's been a coordinated campaign at all levels to rig this election massively and we saw voter inti…
> is just too old to run a democracy this size. Bola Ahmed Tinubu was born 29 March 1952. He is 70. Joe Biden was Born November 20, 1942. He is 80. There are plenty of world leaders that are old and I completely agree with you. Why aren’t there upper age limits? The UK House of Lords, US Congress and US Supreme Court have this problem too.
He claims to be 70 but it's been disputed widely - I don't have the energy to filter signal from noise though.
Re: The drama in trying to convert election PDFs to Spreadsheets
#124I still don't understand how we ended up with PDF as sort of standard to archive data. PDF is already pretty bad for things like manuals but for things like spreadsheets we basically collect the data, then we destroy all the structure by putting it in into POF, and later on we painstakingly try to restore the data from PDF which is often almost impossible to do with accuracy. It just shows that bad solutions often wi…
Back in the day there were at least two programs competing for the role that PDF fills today that I remember: diskpaper and PDF. Apple also had one for its developer docs, but it was never released commercially, I believe. PDF provided more fidelity for printing, had better tooling (it was by Adobe after all), it was cross-platform, could be displayed on the desktop, so it won. The reader was cross-platform so end-us…
> PDF provided more fidelity for printing, had better tooling
This might have been true once, but using Acrobat now is so painful. Of all the apps that work, Apples Preview is my editor of choice and when I’m on Windows I really miss it.
Re: The drama in trying to convert election PDFs to Spreadsheets
#125I still don't understand how we ended up with PDF as sort of standard to archive data. PDF is already pretty bad for things like manuals but for things like spreadsheets we basically collect the data, then we destroy all the structure by putting it in into POF, and later on we painstakingly try to restore the data from PDF which is often almost impossible to do with accuracy. It just shows that bad solutions often wi…
Try https://parsio.io.
It converts PDFs into a structured JSON format that you can export anywhere using a Zapier or Make automation:
Re: The drama in trying to convert election PDFs to Spreadsheets
#126This is some compelling writing. I know this has real life implications for real people so I hope it's not in poor taste to say it would make a good movie.
I agree, but still needs an ending! Will this be a story of triumph or tragedy?
Re: The drama in trying to convert election PDFs to Spreadsheets
#127This is a great example of why electronic voting is important and can help secure democracy.
Wouldn't electronic voting just create a means for the ruling party to deliver the result without releasing evidence of vote tampering?
I don't understand what you think electronic voting solves...
Re: The drama in trying to convert election PDFs to Spreadsheets
#128Re: The drama in trying to convert election PDFs to Spreadsheets
#129Earlier quoted context omitted.
Those are the results for just one state, Adamawa. However, like you I don't know what the overall results are; I agree that the article could make this clearer.
Oh thanks for clarifying. Turns out the link to the folder for all the states is here: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/173oHgms6wYy5WKz_i3Lh... But there doesn't appear to be any file that calculates the nationwide totals. It just seems like such a strange omission but I'm on mobile and can't add up the numbers from across a ton of different files myself.
I downloaded all the .CSV files from that site and quickly loaded them into a table. It just took a couple minutes, but I didn't stop to verify that there were not duplicate rows across the various files.
When I added up the totals, I got: APC - 7,225,399 LP - 5,286,181 PDP - 5,285,900 NNPP - 1,529,575
Note: I was using a beta version of a new database tool I created to do this.
Re: The drama in trying to convert election PDFs to Spreadsheets
#130First of all, what a fantastic and inspiring read. But, I'm left greatly confused -- the article never states whether this changed the result. It says that halfway through counting Obi was in the lead, but nothing about when finished counting. And when I look at the spreadsheet, the last row (#3380) appears to be the totals, which lists: APC LP PDP NNPP 149014 85748 329030 8305 Which shows LP (Obi) in third place, ju…
I totaled up the results from only the "crosschecked" CSV files, here's what I saw:
APC: 5928825
LP: 4731127
PDP: 4555334
NNPP: 1019045
And for the "unsure" CSVs:
APC: 1308067
LP: 578482
PDP: 736183
NNPP: 513245