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The drama in trying to convert election PDFs to Spreadsheets

markessien.com

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Re: The drama in trying to convert election PDFs to Spreadsheets

#141

Post by error503 »

pxc wrote: post #138
error503 wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I collected all the _crosschecked CSVs and got: LP PDP APC NNPP 4731127 4555334 5928825 1019045 Obi seems to make second place here, but far from first. https://i.imgur.com/UaZbXz6.png

There are some conditions under which a presidential election in Nigeria can trigger a runoff election, so that may still matter, right?

It doesn't look like (from TFA or the collected spreadsheets) there's enough information collected (2nd choices) at the polls to support an instant runoff. So they'd need to go back to the polls for a traditional runoff if that were the case.

Re: The drama in trying to convert election PDFs to Spreadsheets

#142

Post by salawat »

hardlianotion wrote: post #128
bundie wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I did not know that Nigerians used Hacker News :-D Most people I encounter on this site are oyinbos.

We are everywhere and cannot be avoided.

On the Internet, no one knows you aren't a Nigerian Prince.

Which is disappointing. Every time I meet an actual Nigerian, I always expect ruffles and platform shoes.

I'm not sure I haven't horribly misunderstood something somewhere...

Re: The drama in trying to convert election PDFs to Spreadsheets

#143

Post by didgetmaster »

jxramos wrote: post #140
didgetmaster wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

should be something quick to whip up in a few minutes in pandas I'd think assuming the column headers are identical and in the same order. It would translate into a bunch of pandas concat call and with the merged table a value_counts for the column where the vote is retained.

I have no doubt that a pandas expert (or a postgres expert, or a mysql expert, or..) can whip up something fairly quickly to load in the data and find the totals.

My tool is designed for people who are not experts but just have a basic understanding of relational tables (e.g. someone comfortable with a spreadsheet) to be able to load a data set like this and analyze it with just a few clicks of a mouse. Using it, I was able to do the whole thing in about 2 minutes.

BTW: When my numbers did not match up with another HN commenter on this thread, I investigated and found a bug in my code. Once fixed the numbers were correct. (I guess that's why it is still in beta!)

Re: The drama in trying to convert election PDFs to Spreadsheets

#144

Post by bunabhucan »

redman25 wrote: post #62

This might be a sensitive question but I wonder if something like this would work in the United States? With all of the fears of election interference why not trust but verify?

The distrust is not based on evidence. Actual election fraud is incredibly rare in the US, typically things like someone owning property in two states and voting the state ballot in one and federal in the other. Getting two ballots is legal but using both is jail time. Typical solo offender is a conservative white male.

Re: The drama in trying to convert election PDFs to Spreadsheets

#145

Post by TazeTSchnitzel »

SkeuomorphicBee wrote: post #55
TazeTSchnitzel wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the contrary, eletronic voting doesn't create the paper trail necessary to dig up frauds like this. You can simply program or hack the system to report any vote total you want.

First of all, hacking the electronic system is much much harder than hacking the paper process. In the case at hand the paper tallying process was the one hacked. And second, electronic systems can create a paper trail, just make the electronic machine spit out a paper receipt. Then you have the best of both worlds, you can have instant electronic totals, and then do some random sampling recounts of the receipts to v…

> just make the electronic machine spit out a paper receipt

Now the person making the vote has to check the receipt matches their input, and they probably don't have a practical form of redress if it doesn't.

Re: The drama in trying to convert election PDFs to Spreadsheets

#146

Post by logifail »

SkeuomorphicBee wrote: post #136
logifail wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> By looking at the receipts printed by the ballot machines. Let's the clear, you're not really "recounting" the ballots at that point. If the machine is compromised - and we're discussing a situation in which we know CCTV was removed and people were then shot - you have no real idea if the receipt corresponds to the voter's original intent. Or, indeed, if all the receipts from all the voters make it as far as the re…

> How is reprinting the final automated tally supposed to represent a "recount" of the original automated tally? If you want to detect tampering in the central totalling, then all you need is the end of day receipt of each ballot. Exactly like in OP's case. If you want to detect tampering in a ballot, then you manually recount the individual printed paper votes inside that ballot. That is something that you should do…

> large scale paper ballot tampering scales very well to the point of turning elections, and is much easier to pull off because it happens in the fringe where no one is looking

In many countries, there are many tens of thousands of individual polling stations. A conspiracy to tamper with enough of them to make a difference isn't going to stay secret for very long because it would have to involve too many people. Tampering with paper ballots just doesn't scale, and in most places, election observers with their old-fashioned Mk I eyeballs are allowed to watch what's going on at every stage.

> (while tampering the electronic system would require pulling your heist in the IT room where everyone is looking)

How would we propose that an average human election observer is supposed to detect whether any particular system involved in electronic voting is - or isn't - in the process of "pulling a heist"?

Re: The drama in trying to convert election PDFs to Spreadsheets

#147

Post by manv1 »

lostlogin wrote: post #124
manv1 wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Well before nobody actually dealt with PDFs directly; they exported it out of FrameMaker or whatever tool they used to compose stuff (ie: print-to-pdf).

Acrobat has always been a really bad PDF editor. I'm not sure why that is, exactly, since their other editing tools were basically industry standard for a long time. All the interactive stuff like fillable forms, etc are probably incredibly hard to build.

Re: The drama in trying to convert election PDFs to Spreadsheets

#148

Post by seunosewa »

varenc wrote: post #106
rqtwteye wrote: post #63

I 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…

For this particular case, the use of PDFs seems irrelevant. Photos were just taken of each polling unit’s results. These photos happened to then be embedded into PDFs for distribution, but the core underlying data is just an image embedded into that PDF. No important data was destroyed when these photos were placed into PDFs.

They should probably have used JPEGS.
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