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An Excel error led Austria's SPÖ to announce the wrong candidate as the winner

395 points by vinnyglennon 3y ago

MrYellowP 3y ago
They can say whatever they want, lie about whatever they want and they can prove whatever they want.
theshrike79 3y ago
Excel still doesn't have any way of doing unit tests or confirming that the content is valid and as it should. For example: you can have an Excel file with 100k lines and have a formula accidentally replaced by a static number on line 87456. Nobody will ever find it.
- dokem 3y ago
  Does Excel have version control and diffing? I know Word does.
  - jonp888 3y ago
    A diff tool called "Spreadsheet Compare" is included with Excel. I don't think its supports "Track Changes" like Word.
    - HPsquared 3y ago
      It supports track changes if you save the file as a "shared workbook". That has a limited feature set, though.
  - nullindividual 3y ago
    When stored on SharePoint, yes to version control.
    - robertlagrant 3y ago
      But it's not useful. Version control on WYSIWYG is definitely not a solved problem.
  - wombatpm 3y ago
    Not in any manner that is useful
- xkcd-sucks 3y ago
  Do people working in finance / government / other places where Excel heavy fields really not have any tooling for "linting"/"typing" (formula replaced by static number in 1 line, integer displayed as date etc) or "unit testing"? This sounds like an assumption worth validating, because it sounds like an easy product to sell for lots of money.
  - theshrike79 3y ago
    Nope. Source: SO works in a field where they handle other people's money and payroll. Not a small mom & pop shop either. The employees use Excel sheets handed over from "someone" and just plug in the numbers. In Britain they messed up the covid numbers because they used the wrong format to store their infection numbers and lost all lines after 65534...
    - veave 3y ago
      I was paid once to turn an Excel sheet into a basic website because the employees kept inadvertently messing with the formulas...
      - pradn 3y ago
        The startup that became Google Sheets was basically an Excel->HTML conversion tool.
  - Tyruiop 3y ago
    Yes. > This sounds like an assumption worth validating, because it sounds like an easy product to sell for lots of money. Unfortunately, it's not so simple. I've worked in exactly this field, getting such institutions/companies to adopt this kind of software is ridiculously hard.
    - AndreasHae 3y ago
      Would love to hear your experience on why that‘s the case. Sounds like an idiot proof value proposition to me, considering the damages that could be avoided.
- tomjakubowski 3y ago
  Is it really not possible to write unit tests for a spreadsheet with Office Script? > and have a formula accidentally replaced by a static number on line 87456 Surely this specific case could be validated externally with a script too.
  - theshrike79 3y ago
    Yes, it's possible to do a VBA macro or an external program to validate a sheet. But there is no built-in tool you can use to say to excel "this column must always be a number, don't ever allow it to be autodetected as a date" or "this column must always have a formula, if the formula doesn't exist or is a static number, alert the user". You can lock cells, but who bothers doing that in the real world.
  - elmolino89 3y ago
    If one has to write a program to check if a user did not screw up cut and paste from one sheet/column/whatever it would be IMHO easier to just skip Excel, user and just write a script automating error prone C&P in Excel. If some user wants to view it, then the script can create a valid Excel file.
- HPsquared 3y ago
  There are certainly a lot of good practices such as ensuring any formulas are compatible with "fill down". It'd make for a nice standard, like MISRA C. If you wanted automatic formula auditing, I'd recommend using R1C1 reference style so formulas using relative references are independent of the cell's location, then use FORMULATEXT function, and an array formula applied over the whole range you want to check. Then you could be sure.
  - MonkeyClub 3y ago
    > If you wanted automatic formula auditing, I'd recommend using R1C1 reference style so formulas That's indeed one of the basic suggestions in Spolsky's "You Suck At Excel": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0nbkaYsR94c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0nbkaYsR94c
- layer8 3y ago
  Regarding your example, you can protect worksheets and have only some cells unlocked for modification [1]. You can add conditional formatting, VBA procedures, additional formulas etc. to do whatever validation you like. However, you need a software engineer (or someone who thinks like one) to properly implement that, and it’s not exactly fun. [1] https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/lock-or-unlock-specific-areas-of-a-protected-worksheet-75481b72-db8a-4267-8c43-042a5f2cd93a https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/lock-or-unlock-sp...
  - x3874 3y ago
    ...and in the year 2525 one still cannot avoid having their users mistakingly copy & paste formatting and thus destroy auto-extending Excel tables... There are workarounds using VBA, but not via Typescipt - the Excel JS API knows no clipboard.
- dilap 3y ago
  Have two different people do the same work, see if they get the same answer. Ideally the two people use different tools, so "likely to make same mistake" is minimized.
  - kamikaz1k 3y ago
    “A man with one watch always knows what time it is. A man with two watches is never sure.”
    - gilleain 3y ago
      Oh man. My mother's house has so many clocks with a variety of opinions on what the time is. I have to average them to get an estimate of what the real time is.
    - MichaelZuo 3y ago
      That's why you need three watches.
    - the8472 3y ago
      Every man now has access to a swarm of atomic clocks in Earth orbit and the necessary relativistic corrections to know time anywhere on earth, down to a few nanoseconds.
      - scrivna 3y ago
        Tell that to my microwave, my oven, the clock in my car, my watch, the clock on the wall…
- miroljub 3y ago
  That's why you use SQL and not Excel to analyse the data.
  - theshrike79 3y ago
    Will you be the one to teach boomer-age payroll accountants to create SQL tables for their calculations? I can give you a phone number to offer your consulting services :) Of course a custom website backed by a properly schema'd SQL database would be better, but that takes money, time and someone needs to keep it updated. People use Excel because it's on everyone's computer by default, they have full permissions to do anything with it without needing IT approval and it's surprisingly powerful when you get into it. And if a client happens to have a really weird non-standard requirement for how their payroll is done, any accountant can easily create a custom Excel sheet just for them - instead of waiting 6 months for an external consultant company to provide them with a custom tool that does 80% what they need.
    - miroljub 3y ago
      I understand why people still use Excel, but then, it's to be expected that there will be errors. And that's fine, some errors can be tolerated if the saving for using cheap tools with a cheap workforce is big enough. But if you want reliability, just don't use Excel because making it bulletproof is pricier than just using SQL for reporting and analysis.
- mikehollinger 3y ago
  > Excel still doesn't have any way of doing unit tests or confirming that the content is valid and as it should. I make this point when chatting with new team members that say "let's just use X," without really understanding how X works, and I use Excel as the analogy. Most people know how to use an equation field. Most people don't consider writing a spreadsheet programming, but it is. And just like other types of programs, you can have really insidious bugs, and you need to consider how you'll address those, or address changes in the underlying or internal components of the system. A famous one is that floating point math in excel can give you different answers for "is this the same as that" depending on how you write the equation, for example.
  - enjo 3y ago
    Starting in 2003 I spent several years as a principal developer developing mobile office software. When we launched our excel compatible spreadsheet we diligently formalized every function and wrote tests to verify behavior. It was beautiful. Then we started receiving lots of bug reports from users because our calculations often didn’t match what they were seeing in Excel. Older Excel versions had lots of bugs and Microsoft had been carrying them forward because at that point it was “better” to carry the errors forward and display results people expected rather than fixing them and having everyone confused by the changed results. So we copied their behavior as best we could. I wish I had the list still but it was long and full of weird edge cases which caused formulas to be incorrect.
    - lfconsult 3y ago
      Incredible story.
      - emeril 3y ago
        yeah, that's a classic read
    - virgulino 3y ago
      Just as Excel carried the Lotus 123 bugs. https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2006/06/16/my-first-billg-review/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2006/06/16/my-first-billg-rev...
- pjacotg 3y ago
  I've built a unit testing framework for Excel using Python and the openpyxl library. I work in a bank and using Excel was unavoidable in some cases. You'd basically build a test suite for a spreadsheet in Python and run it like a regular test suite. It helped a lot in catching issues. Obviously it would be nicer if unit testing was built into Excel, but it is possible to build side tools around it.
  - riffraff 3y ago
    I know a guy who worked at $BIGBANK and did the same with Ruby, he gave us a presentation about it at a local user group meetup many years ago. IIRC, he was pretty proud of being able not only to have a regression test suite, but also being able to do TDD-excel :)
    - pjacotg 3y ago
      I completely appreciate that. I was also attempting to tell regular excel users about the virtues of TDD! I had grander plans where I imagined creating centralised test suites that caught more generic issues and anybody in the bank could upload their spreadsheet for validation. It didn't quite get that far though.
- pc86 3y ago
  I've had columns filled with a formula and intentionally replaced one cell with a static value. You immediately get a warning on that cell that can be ignored/cleared but takes a handful of clicks to do so. Granted, there's no overall place to view the warnings (that I am aware of) so if you have 100k lines and one cell replaced you can't easily see it without inspecting everything. Is this no longer the case?
  - theshrike79 3y ago
    I just made an Excel sheet, put in formulas and I could just type over any formula with numbers without any notifications or errors. How do you manage to require "a handful of clicks" to do it?
    - mkishi 3y ago
      This only happens in "proper" tables. When you add a formula to a table column, Excel will automatically convert it into a "calculated column," so overridden values will have a green mark denoting an "inconsistent formula." It's still a pretty minor warning and it only requires two clicks to ignore.
- wpietri 3y ago
  I agree with the general thrust of your point, but I should point out that there are non-technological ways to error-proof. E.g., this pre-computer approach: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double-entry_bookkeeping https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double-entry_bookkeeping
- rvba 3y ago
  Excel marks inconsistent formulas, there is also a formula checker.
- jimnotgym 3y ago
  Well it depends on your data. I'm an accountant and it is very normal for accountants spreadsheets to be full of 'check digits'. Checks and balances are well ingrained into accounts! In its basic form you perform the same calculation on the totals as you did on the roots and subtract it from the result. The answer must be zero. I know it is harder on some kinds of data, but it can prevent a huge amount of every day errors.
  - samrus 3y ago
    Makes perfect sense. The testing being discussed is to create platform where generic tests can be coded and rerun. So tests that aren't specific to totals and subtotals
- Foobar8568 3y ago
  Power query solves these issues
kermatt 3y ago
These aren’t “technical errors”. These are user errors, made by people who know just enough about Excel to use it, but not to include anything that validates the results - or constraints that prevent intentional or unintentional manipulation of sheets, once considered “done”. Unfortunately, this is not a problem with the tool, Excel does what it’s supposed to. Any tool in the hands of someone not properly trained to use it, or without the discipline to use it correctly, adds a risk of incorrect output.
- mint2 3y ago
  I would say that the Citibank loan payment fiasco was mostly due to bad software design - which yes is mostly due to bad management priorities and validation. I don’t think most people look at that and say “that was pure user error, the software is fine” On the other side of the spectrum there’s pure user error aka pebkac. Where does this instance sit on the spectrum, I.e. even although it is possible to do a lot of things in excel, it’s often not a good idea to do many of things in it for a variety of deficiencies.
- cultureswitch 3y ago
  It is a problem with the tool. The footguns outnumber useful functionality ten to one.
- somat 3y ago
  The problem is fundamental to the spreadsheet data model. Spreadsheets use the "big bag of cells" data model, where anything can go anywhere. The people who enjoy spreadsheets like this data model, it is very quick to get something up and running. Those of us who don't like spreadsheets hate it. it encourages the mixing of data and code. it promotes coding via copy/paste and all the opportunities for code/data addressing mismatches that go with it. But for me the thing that drives spreadsheets from mildly annoying to outright dislike is that there is very little done to keep data rows intact, it is very easy for items in a row of data to end up where they shouldn't be. All I really want is row security... So I ended up replacing my spreadsheets with relational databases. the UI sucks in comparison. but at least my rows stay intact.
s1mplicissimus 3y ago
apparently the total vote count was 600 and something. definitely need excel to count that out sigh
- lynx23 3y ago
  Wrong. The count of the unaccounted votes was 600. Around 100k people voted in this "election".
  - quintussss 3y ago
    No this is not true. There was an election among party members, that was with around 147000 people. This election apparently worked. It was the subsequent election among the party functionaries (601 people) that failed due to someone not being able to do 4th grade math.
rurban 3y ago
If they cannot convingly explain this mishap, they need to recount the election counts. Austria is not 3rd world dictatorship as Turkey or the USA with such ridiculities.
- catchnear4321 3y ago
  > Austria is not 3rd world dictatorship as Turkey or the USA with such ridiculities. we will see.
- dontupvoteme 3y ago
  Turkey had a runoff election after a close result and a third party splitting the vote. Imagine if that happened in 92 back in the states. If by dictatorship you mean the military coups from its history -- that is an interesting and unique-in-the-world situation where Atatürk granted power to the military to overthrow the government if they strayed too far from his Kemalist ideal of the republic, probably the only coups in human history which the end goal was to force the people to have another election (with the not so subtle threat to not make them have to come back again -- this is the origin of the term "deep state" which became popularized in the US recently) Now there is evidence that the US had a hand in some of the original (pre-2016) coups. I would be wary to oversimplify Turkish politics.
- manmal 3y ago
  They did a recount. In fact, that’s how they figured out there has been a mistake. Otherwise, nobody would have found out. It’s only ca 600 votes btw, so very easy to recount.
  - logifail 3y ago
    > It’s only ca 600 votes btw Yet, in the run up to this (party leadership) election, it was far from clear exactly who the ca 600 voters actually were. None of the candidates apparently knew! The winner is Andreas Babler who is firmly on the left wing of his party. On 24th May he gave two TV interviews. In the first interview, prerecorded and broadbast on the Puls24 channel, he said "I'm a Marxist". In the second (live) interview on another channel later that day he was asked about his statement from earlier on, he answered "I really don't understand the excitement". The interviewer (Armin Wolf) then challenged him about what Marxism means and whether Marxism is something that a majority of Austrian voters could support. At this point Babler backed off. Interviewer: "So you're not a Marxist after all?" Babler: "No, not at all. If you interpret it that way."
atoav 3y ago
And the winner is "January 3rd 2023"
- robertlagrant 3y ago
  The first person to change their legal name to #NAME? wins.
irthomasthomas 3y ago
A series of excel errors, including failure to copy down a formula to the whole column, led many governments to adopt a policy of economic austerity. The spreadsheet had demonstrated that, historically, countries that adopted austerity came out of recession faster. Once the errors in the spread where fixed, it actually proved the opposite. But by then the damage was done. Edit: It was UMASS grad students that spotted the spreadsheet errors by these Harvard/IMF heavy weights:) Reinhart and Rogoff kindly provided us with the working spreadsheet from the RR analysis. With the working spreadsheet, we were able to approximate closely the published RR results. While using RR’s working spreadsheet, we identified coding errors, selective exclusion of available data, and unconventional weighting of summary statistics. https://peri.umass.edu/fileadmin/pdf/working_papers/working_papers_301-350/WP322.pdf https://peri.umass.edu/fileadmin/pdf/working_papers/working_... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Growth_in_a_Time_of_Debt https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Growth_in_a_Time_of_Debt
- skeaker 3y ago
  Is there an article for that? It sounds like it could make for an interesting sort of butterfly-effect story.
  - PlatinumHarp 3y ago
    https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2013/apr/18/uncovered-error-george-osborne-austerity https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2013/apr/18/uncovered-e...
- musha68k 3y ago
  Wow, was this widely reported? Do you have sources?
  - croes 3y ago
    [flagged]
  - smeyer 3y ago
    Yes, it has been widely reported. If you do an online search for something like "rogoff excel" you can see reporting all across mainstream media.
croes 3y ago
Excel and ChatGPT have lot in common, great tools but easy to be used wrong or the wrong purpose. Especially because it seems so easy to get results.
antiloper 3y ago
They discovered this during a recount that only happened because someone noticed a different calculation error in the official result [1] ("Hans Peter Doskozil" + "Andreas Babler" should add up to "Gültige Stimmen" (valid votes) but didn't). The current goverment is very unpopular, but the SPÖ in the opposition has failed to capitalize on that and is currently polling below the governing ÖVP [2]. This incident will not help. [1] https://twitter.com/MartinThuer/status/1664992876231639042 https://twitter.com/MartinThuer/status/1664992876231639042 [2] https://apa.at/produkt/apa-wahltrend/ https://apa.at/produkt/apa-wahltrend/
- mschuster91 3y ago
  > The current goverment is very unpopular, but the SPÖ in the opposition has failed to capitalize on that and is currently polling below the governing ÖVP [2]. This incident will not help. That's because the SPÖ has made the same mistake that the German SPD or French and Italian PS did: they went away from their worker roots and aligned themselves with corporatist ideals (i.e. neoliberalism). No surprise that their electorate eroded together with the wealth and life quality of said electorate thanks to wage stagnation. Babler is an actual social democrat in name and politics. I am pretty sure he will manage to turn around the party's fate - and hopefully, also be an example towards our social democrats, I'm sick of Olaf Scholz and his cuddling with the FDP.
  - idiotsecant 3y ago
    I would argue this is the inevitable result of all political entities. They get captured by the richest parts of the system they're supposed to rule over. This happens to left and right leaning organizations, the only difference is what kinds of undesirable policies result. This is why a political system that lets parties be born and die naturally is preferable to the US two-party system. We're stuck with a choice between two vampires.
    - heresie-dabord 3y ago
      > political entities [...] get captured by the richest parts of the system they're supposed to rule over. This is expressed well. To be complete, we could say, Political parties in a country are subverted at all levels by robust economic interests, and subverted at the federal level by robust regional economic interests, which in turn subverts the national interest.
timcavel 3y ago
[dead]
RcouF1uZ4gsC 3y ago
I would guess that the average in use Excel spreadsheet has fewer errors than the equivalent custom written app. I would also guess that it is far more understandable to far more people than the equivalent custom written app. It is also likely far easier to modify for far more people than the average custom written app. With regards to unit testing, do you test your unit tests? My guess is that the average excel spreadsheet has fewer errors than the average unit test.
- dvdkon 3y ago
  Your guesses seem suspect to me. I'll take a small Python script with a loop over a spreadsheet any day.
  - Macha 3y ago
    Especially when you consider stuff like "Oh I want all the rows, but only know how to type in exact cell references. Ehh, 100 rows should do", and someone misses that their totals for a 10 year period are only including the first 8 and a bit years.
jkepler 3y ago
This isn't the first time spreadsheet errors have messed with election results. It was a column error in tabulated election results that cause all the conflict in 2020 in Antrim county, Michigan. Any computer folks who took the time to read the report by an University of Michigan computer scientist hired by the Republican chaired bipartisan committee that the Michigan state senate would have seen that there was no vote fraud, but user error that got caught almost immediately in the accountability systems that were in place to catch any errors like that. If we stopped trying to report election returns in real time like sporting events, and could be patient a few hours, we could avoid a lot of these highly divisive controversies.
- listenallyall 3y ago
  > If we stopped trying to report election returns in real time ... we could avoid a lot of these highly divisive controversies. At least in the United States, election results were reported the same night for decades and there were very few questions surrounding the truth, even in 2000 people agreed on the need for a recount, even if they disagreed on the methodology or the ultimate result. Only since 2020, all of a sudden results take multiple days and the electorate is supposed to just understand "this is how it is now" and not question anything, despite witnessing major swings in individual states or districts occurring overnight.
  - jkepler 3y ago
    I agree things have become far more contentious since 2020. Trump's campaign used that controversy to fund-raise for "legal defense" but the small print in his campaign emails I received also said the funds could be used to pay down his campaign debts. If you haven't read the Michigan Senate report (result of an 8-month bipartisan investigation chaired by a Trump Republican), please do. It cleared the air and answered tons of questions for me, seeing the evidence they found and realizing that there are simple, understandable reasons explaining what happened and also explaining the ruckus that resulted from so many people crying fraud but being unwilling to take time themselves to investigate the facts of the matter.
    - 3y ago
B1FF_PSUVM 3y ago
> wrong candidate "Too early to tell."
blop 3y ago
There's actually an annual conference dedicated to Spreadsheet risks, they have lots of Excel horror stories on their website: https://eusprig.org/research-info/horror-stories/ https://eusprig.org/research-info/horror-stories/
ikekkdcjkfke 3y ago
If they made all source material available and a law that makes discrimination against who you voted for hate speech
- jkepler 3y ago
  Much of it is public record. And if you don't have time to wade through the data, the court cases Trump's campaign litigated provide a wealth of one the record, sworn testimony and evidence.[1] I was amazed to read, for example, in Pennsylvania that when Rudy Giuliani was sworn under oath he told the judge that they were not alleging fraud had occurred in the election, yet in the media and in public he was loudly crying "Fraud!" Follow the facts. [1] You can find the case names to know what to search for here: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-election_lawsuits_related_to_the_2020_U.S._presidential_election https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-election_lawsuits_relat...
jcims 3y ago
Somewhere in the universe there is an accounting of the net effect of Excel errors on the planet. It's probably horrifying.
tragomaskhalos 3y ago
My wife is a school administrator and every year I run a little self-written pipeline for her to munge the local authority's XML admissions data into an Xlsx that the staff can use for planning home visits, class allocation etc. Excel (well strictly speaking it's loaded into Google sheets) really is the only game in town for this kind of thing, but even at this very low level there are many fraught footguns necessitating extremely careful handling. Anyone running an election or an economy off this thing needs their head examined.
- ehvatum 3y ago
  The R community is fantastic and very helpful for getting started. There is so much peace of mind to be gained by doing everything in R and then using R’s write.xlsx to output the excel sheet for your users. Python+pandas is an ok alternative. The ergonomics are weird, but if you’re familiar with Python, it works enough.
lynx23 3y ago
Well, this does not come as a surprise at all. The digital age totally passed these people without notice. As did many other things. Sad to watch, but this party is killing itself. This is what happens when you no longer can pretend, and would actually need to act, but then it turns out all your minions are pretty incapable of acting properly, so, this is what results...
treeman79 3y ago
[flagged]
- mrWiz 3y ago
  The implication is that these ballots were then counted in the swing states and added to their results rather than NY's. How would this even work? Each state has different ballots which reflect the races in that state and municipality. Even without any additional checks, trying to count ballots from a different state is like trying to fit a square peg in a round hole.
  - Kon-Peki 3y ago
    Don't even bother using logic. Gateway Pundit is fake news. https://www.npr.org/2023/06/04/1171159008/eric-investigation-voter-data-election-integrity https://www.npr.org/2023/06/04/1171159008/eric-investigation...
    - mrWiz 3y ago
      On one hand I know that the facts don't matter and Gateway Pundit only needs to focus on the conclusion, not the evidence. On the other hand, I'm still befuddled by "stories" like this, which are obviously and immediately false to anyone who's voted in a federal election before.
andix 3y ago
The tragedy about it is, that they only had to count 600 votes and had a committee of 20 people for doing that. All 20 people could’ve just counted all the votes, without any „technology“ involved.
- andix 3y ago
  All the experts said, that usually in such an election the ballots are sorted by candidate, put on stacks of 10s, then combined to stacks of 100s. If they followed this best practice, they would’ve had around 10 stacks, and the result would‘ve been obvious to everyone. (Not so) funny twist: after the election the ballots were put into unsealed bags and were stored in an office where many people had access. So all recounts that are done now, are completely worthless.
EMCymatics 3y ago
Wonderful
wolfi1 3y ago
they counted the ballots of every box separately and used excel to add the numbers together, that's not an excel error (it were about 600 ballots altogether, so pencil and paper would have sufficed)
efitz 3y ago
I can’t believe the election disinformation being posted here. That was the fairest election in history. We shouldn’t be spreading conspiracy theories about election software or operator errors. I learned all this I 2020.
logdap 3y ago
[flagged]
gsich 3y ago
This is not an Excel error. It's user error. Don't blame software like it's some force of nature that you can't control.
gsich 3y ago
This is not an Excel error. It's user error. Don't blame software like it's some force of nature that you can't control. Confusing names is not something Excel can prevent.
Galacta7 3y ago
This reminds me of the Excel scoring error by NASA that impacted where the Space Shuttles would be retired. Basically costing the National Museum of the U.S. Air Force an orbiter (though the NASA Administrator says it wouldn't have made a difference in the end). It was a bad enough screwup that Congress complained and NASA's OIG filed a report on the incident. It's a pretty interesting read: https://oig.nasa.gov/docs/Review_NASAs_Selection_Display_Locations.pdf https://oig.nasa.gov/docs/Review_NASAs_Selection_Display_Loc...
perlgeek 3y ago
Ok, that's embarrassing, but good on the for still having real votes, I guess? Here in Germany it's far too common for political parties to decide such things ahead of elections behind closed doors, and then the election is only there to show the party's support for the new leader. Which annoys me to no end, because it defeats the whole purpose of the democratic process.
throwaway106382 3y ago
[flagged]
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
de6u99er 3y ago
That's quite embarrassing. I personally am happy that my favored candidate has won in the end. People need to stop using this horrible tool. I have watched people doing things in Excel in seconds for stuff that would take me multiple minutes. Main difference is me checking if results after each transformation are plausible. I wonder how often such "Excel-Errors" led to wrong decisions.
mo_42 3y ago
I think Microsoft should improve Excel in several ways. Especially, there should be version control and a possibility to review code. Sometimes I see super complex Excel calculations. The code is barely readable because it’s in this tiny text area. These people are real programmers. But they are constrained by a tool. That would also be the alternative if Microsoft doesn’t improve this. Switch over to version controlled and reviewed code in R, Python, …
- elmolino89 3y ago
  In any Excel sheet everything is mixed up: you got raw data, calculated values, formulas, formatting, plots etc. With a Jupyter notebook you have these well separated, and there is a little chance that someone somehow changed the font in one of the 20k cells with values. Scaling up plots or changing the color scheme are explicit: you must have a cell changing the defaults. Yu can not just muse over some cell, press Del and plonk it. If you verified say md5 checksum for the raw data file it contains what you expect it to contain. If you follow up actions of an average Excel user, then it is a long chain of mostly purely manual manipulations, like selecting the cells, copy and paste, add color here and there etc. A lot of steps to check and verify. Compared to SQL or data frame manipulations it is too complicated to be really useful IMHO
LatteLazy 3y ago
I love Excel, it's amazing. It should be illegal to use it for any critical issue. We "lost" 1000s of covid cases back in the pandemic here in the UK because the version of excel they were using only had 65k rows. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-54423988 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-54423988
robomartin 3y ago
I cannot overstress just how much attention one has to pay to verification of any results produced using Excel. Don't get me wrong, I think it is a fantastic tool and have been using it for decades. However, I have the scars to prove just how badly it can hurt you. One of the best (worst?) cases was a bug that caused a custom high speed board based on Xilinx FPGA's to have intermittent failures that were very difficult to track down. It was six months of almost 12 hours a day fully engulfed in debugging this FPGA code. I must have re-written it from the bottom up three times during this period. You get to the point where you start to doubt spaces within statements...even when you know damn well they are irrelevant. And then, one day, at two in the morning, while looking at the code that generated coefficients for a set of polyphase FIR filers, and a micro-coded state machine that drove that module, I saw the problem. I made a mistake in the calculations and used ROUND() instead of ROUNDUP(). This caused all kinds of crazy issues, like FIFO's being short by one element and jumps occurring at the wrong time. It was truly maddening. The Verilog code this spreadsheet generated was copied and pasted right into a couple of Verilog modules and compiled into the chip without even looking at it. It worked very well, it just didn't do what we wanted it to do. We still use Excel a lot to help generate code. However, lessons learned over the years made us far less trusting, which is good.

395 points by vinnyglennon 3y ago

They can say whatever they want, lie about whatever they want and they can prove whatever they want.

Excel still doesn't have any way of doing unit tests or confirming that the content is valid and as it should. For example: you can have an Excel file with 100k lines and have a formula accidentally replaced by a static number on line 87456. Nobody will ever find it.

dokem 3y ago
Does Excel have version control and diffing? I know Word does.
- jonp888 3y ago
  A diff tool called "Spreadsheet Compare" is included with Excel. I don't think its supports "Track Changes" like Word.
  - HPsquared 3y ago
    It supports track changes if you save the file as a "shared workbook". That has a limited feature set, though.
- nullindividual 3y ago
  When stored on SharePoint, yes to version control.
  - robertlagrant 3y ago
    But it's not useful. Version control on WYSIWYG is definitely not a solved problem.
- wombatpm 3y ago
  Not in any manner that is useful
xkcd-sucks 3y ago
Do people working in finance / government / other places where Excel heavy fields really not have any tooling for "linting"/"typing" (formula replaced by static number in 1 line, integer displayed as date etc) or "unit testing"? This sounds like an assumption worth validating, because it sounds like an easy product to sell for lots of money.
- theshrike79 3y ago
  Nope. Source: SO works in a field where they handle other people's money and payroll. Not a small mom & pop shop either. The employees use Excel sheets handed over from "someone" and just plug in the numbers. In Britain they messed up the covid numbers because they used the wrong format to store their infection numbers and lost all lines after 65534...
  - veave 3y ago
    I was paid once to turn an Excel sheet into a basic website because the employees kept inadvertently messing with the formulas...
    - pradn 3y ago
      The startup that became Google Sheets was basically an Excel->HTML conversion tool.
- Tyruiop 3y ago
  Yes. > This sounds like an assumption worth validating, because it sounds like an easy product to sell for lots of money. Unfortunately, it's not so simple. I've worked in exactly this field, getting such institutions/companies to adopt this kind of software is ridiculously hard.
  - AndreasHae 3y ago
    Would love to hear your experience on why that‘s the case. Sounds like an idiot proof value proposition to me, considering the damages that could be avoided.
tomjakubowski 3y ago
Is it really not possible to write unit tests for a spreadsheet with Office Script? > and have a formula accidentally replaced by a static number on line 87456 Surely this specific case could be validated externally with a script too.
- theshrike79 3y ago
  Yes, it's possible to do a VBA macro or an external program to validate a sheet. But there is no built-in tool you can use to say to excel "this column must always be a number, don't ever allow it to be autodetected as a date" or "this column must always have a formula, if the formula doesn't exist or is a static number, alert the user". You can lock cells, but who bothers doing that in the real world.
- elmolino89 3y ago
  If one has to write a program to check if a user did not screw up cut and paste from one sheet/column/whatever it would be IMHO easier to just skip Excel, user and just write a script automating error prone C&P in Excel. If some user wants to view it, then the script can create a valid Excel file.
HPsquared 3y ago
There are certainly a lot of good practices such as ensuring any formulas are compatible with "fill down". It'd make for a nice standard, like MISRA C. If you wanted automatic formula auditing, I'd recommend using R1C1 reference style so formulas using relative references are independent of the cell's location, then use FORMULATEXT function, and an array formula applied over the whole range you want to check. Then you could be sure.
- MonkeyClub 3y ago
  > If you wanted automatic formula auditing, I'd recommend using R1C1 reference style so formulas That's indeed one of the basic suggestions in Spolsky's "You Suck At Excel": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0nbkaYsR94c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0nbkaYsR94c
layer8 3y ago
Regarding your example, you can protect worksheets and have only some cells unlocked for modification [1]. You can add conditional formatting, VBA procedures, additional formulas etc. to do whatever validation you like. However, you need a software engineer (or someone who thinks like one) to properly implement that, and it’s not exactly fun. [1] https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/lock-or-unlock-specific-areas-of-a-protected-worksheet-75481b72-db8a-4267-8c43-042a5f2cd93a https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/lock-or-unlock-sp...
- x3874 3y ago
  ...and in the year 2525 one still cannot avoid having their users mistakingly copy & paste formatting and thus destroy auto-extending Excel tables... There are workarounds using VBA, but not via Typescipt - the Excel JS API knows no clipboard.
dilap 3y ago
Have two different people do the same work, see if they get the same answer. Ideally the two people use different tools, so "likely to make same mistake" is minimized.
- kamikaz1k 3y ago
  “A man with one watch always knows what time it is. A man with two watches is never sure.”
  - gilleain 3y ago
    Oh man. My mother's house has so many clocks with a variety of opinions on what the time is. I have to average them to get an estimate of what the real time is.
  - MichaelZuo 3y ago
    That's why you need three watches.
  - the8472 3y ago
    Every man now has access to a swarm of atomic clocks in Earth orbit and the necessary relativistic corrections to know time anywhere on earth, down to a few nanoseconds.
    - scrivna 3y ago
      Tell that to my microwave, my oven, the clock in my car, my watch, the clock on the wall…
miroljub 3y ago
That's why you use SQL and not Excel to analyse the data.
- theshrike79 3y ago
  Will you be the one to teach boomer-age payroll accountants to create SQL tables for their calculations? I can give you a phone number to offer your consulting services :) Of course a custom website backed by a properly schema'd SQL database would be better, but that takes money, time and someone needs to keep it updated. People use Excel because it's on everyone's computer by default, they have full permissions to do anything with it without needing IT approval and it's surprisingly powerful when you get into it. And if a client happens to have a really weird non-standard requirement for how their payroll is done, any accountant can easily create a custom Excel sheet just for them - instead of waiting 6 months for an external consultant company to provide them with a custom tool that does 80% what they need.
  - miroljub 3y ago
    I understand why people still use Excel, but then, it's to be expected that there will be errors. And that's fine, some errors can be tolerated if the saving for using cheap tools with a cheap workforce is big enough. But if you want reliability, just don't use Excel because making it bulletproof is pricier than just using SQL for reporting and analysis.
mikehollinger 3y ago
> Excel still doesn't have any way of doing unit tests or confirming that the content is valid and as it should. I make this point when chatting with new team members that say "let's just use X," without really understanding how X works, and I use Excel as the analogy. Most people know how to use an equation field. Most people don't consider writing a spreadsheet programming, but it is. And just like other types of programs, you can have really insidious bugs, and you need to consider how you'll address those, or address changes in the underlying or internal components of the system. A famous one is that floating point math in excel can give you different answers for "is this the same as that" depending on how you write the equation, for example.
- enjo 3y ago
  Starting in 2003 I spent several years as a principal developer developing mobile office software. When we launched our excel compatible spreadsheet we diligently formalized every function and wrote tests to verify behavior. It was beautiful. Then we started receiving lots of bug reports from users because our calculations often didn’t match what they were seeing in Excel. Older Excel versions had lots of bugs and Microsoft had been carrying them forward because at that point it was “better” to carry the errors forward and display results people expected rather than fixing them and having everyone confused by the changed results. So we copied their behavior as best we could. I wish I had the list still but it was long and full of weird edge cases which caused formulas to be incorrect.
  - lfconsult 3y ago
    Incredible story.
    - emeril 3y ago
      yeah, that's a classic read
  - virgulino 3y ago
    Just as Excel carried the Lotus 123 bugs. https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2006/06/16/my-first-billg-review/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2006/06/16/my-first-billg-rev...
pjacotg 3y ago
I've built a unit testing framework for Excel using Python and the openpyxl library. I work in a bank and using Excel was unavoidable in some cases. You'd basically build a test suite for a spreadsheet in Python and run it like a regular test suite. It helped a lot in catching issues. Obviously it would be nicer if unit testing was built into Excel, but it is possible to build side tools around it.
- riffraff 3y ago
  I know a guy who worked at $BIGBANK and did the same with Ruby, he gave us a presentation about it at a local user group meetup many years ago. IIRC, he was pretty proud of being able not only to have a regression test suite, but also being able to do TDD-excel :)
  - pjacotg 3y ago
    I completely appreciate that. I was also attempting to tell regular excel users about the virtues of TDD! I had grander plans where I imagined creating centralised test suites that caught more generic issues and anybody in the bank could upload their spreadsheet for validation. It didn't quite get that far though.
pc86 3y ago
I've had columns filled with a formula and intentionally replaced one cell with a static value. You immediately get a warning on that cell that can be ignored/cleared but takes a handful of clicks to do so. Granted, there's no overall place to view the warnings (that I am aware of) so if you have 100k lines and one cell replaced you can't easily see it without inspecting everything. Is this no longer the case?
- theshrike79 3y ago
  I just made an Excel sheet, put in formulas and I could just type over any formula with numbers without any notifications or errors. How do you manage to require "a handful of clicks" to do it?
  - mkishi 3y ago
    This only happens in "proper" tables. When you add a formula to a table column, Excel will automatically convert it into a "calculated column," so overridden values will have a green mark denoting an "inconsistent formula." It's still a pretty minor warning and it only requires two clicks to ignore.
wpietri 3y ago
I agree with the general thrust of your point, but I should point out that there are non-technological ways to error-proof. E.g., this pre-computer approach: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double-entry_bookkeeping https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double-entry_bookkeeping
rvba 3y ago
Excel marks inconsistent formulas, there is also a formula checker.
jimnotgym 3y ago
Well it depends on your data. I'm an accountant and it is very normal for accountants spreadsheets to be full of 'check digits'. Checks and balances are well ingrained into accounts! In its basic form you perform the same calculation on the totals as you did on the roots and subtract it from the result. The answer must be zero. I know it is harder on some kinds of data, but it can prevent a huge amount of every day errors.
- samrus 3y ago
  Makes perfect sense. The testing being discussed is to create platform where generic tests can be coded and rerun. So tests that aren't specific to totals and subtotals
Foobar8568 3y ago
Power query solves these issues

kermatt 3y ago

These aren’t “technical errors”. These are user errors, made by people who know just enough about Excel to use it, but not to include anything that validates the results - or constraints that prevent intentional or unintentional manipulation of sheets, once considered “done”. Unfortunately, this is not a problem with the tool, Excel does what it’s supposed to. Any tool in the hands of someone not properly trained to use it, or without the discipline to use it correctly, adds a risk of incorrect output.

mint2 3y ago
I would say that the Citibank loan payment fiasco was mostly due to bad software design - which yes is mostly due to bad management priorities and validation. I don’t think most people look at that and say “that was pure user error, the software is fine” On the other side of the spectrum there’s pure user error aka pebkac. Where does this instance sit on the spectrum, I.e. even although it is possible to do a lot of things in excel, it’s often not a good idea to do many of things in it for a variety of deficiencies.
cultureswitch 3y ago
It is a problem with the tool. The footguns outnumber useful functionality ten to one.
somat 3y ago
The problem is fundamental to the spreadsheet data model. Spreadsheets use the "big bag of cells" data model, where anything can go anywhere. The people who enjoy spreadsheets like this data model, it is very quick to get something up and running. Those of us who don't like spreadsheets hate it. it encourages the mixing of data and code. it promotes coding via copy/paste and all the opportunities for code/data addressing mismatches that go with it. But for me the thing that drives spreadsheets from mildly annoying to outright dislike is that there is very little done to keep data rows intact, it is very easy for items in a row of data to end up where they shouldn't be. All I really want is row security... So I ended up replacing my spreadsheets with relational databases. the UI sucks in comparison. but at least my rows stay intact.

s1mplicissimus 3y ago

apparently the total vote count was 600 and something. definitely need excel to count that out sigh

lynx23 3y ago
Wrong. The count of the unaccounted votes was 600. Around 100k people voted in this "election".
- quintussss 3y ago
  No this is not true. There was an election among party members, that was with around 147000 people. This election apparently worked. It was the subsequent election among the party functionaries (601 people) that failed due to someone not being able to do 4th grade math.

rurban 3y ago

If they cannot convingly explain this mishap, they need to recount the election counts. Austria is not 3rd world dictatorship as Turkey or the USA with such ridiculities.

catchnear4321 3y ago
> Austria is not 3rd world dictatorship as Turkey or the USA with such ridiculities. we will see.
dontupvoteme 3y ago
Turkey had a runoff election after a close result and a third party splitting the vote. Imagine if that happened in 92 back in the states. If by dictatorship you mean the military coups from its history -- that is an interesting and unique-in-the-world situation where Atatürk granted power to the military to overthrow the government if they strayed too far from his Kemalist ideal of the republic, probably the only coups in human history which the end goal was to force the people to have another election (with the not so subtle threat to not make them have to come back again -- this is the origin of the term "deep state" which became popularized in the US recently) Now there is evidence that the US had a hand in some of the original (pre-2016) coups. I would be wary to oversimplify Turkish politics.
manmal 3y ago
They did a recount. In fact, that’s how they figured out there has been a mistake. Otherwise, nobody would have found out. It’s only ca 600 votes btw, so very easy to recount.
- logifail 3y ago
  > It’s only ca 600 votes btw Yet, in the run up to this (party leadership) election, it was far from clear exactly who the ca 600 voters actually were. None of the candidates apparently knew! The winner is Andreas Babler who is firmly on the left wing of his party. On 24th May he gave two TV interviews. In the first interview, prerecorded and broadbast on the Puls24 channel, he said "I'm a Marxist". In the second (live) interview on another channel later that day he was asked about his statement from earlier on, he answered "I really don't understand the excitement". The interviewer (Armin Wolf) then challenged him about what Marxism means and whether Marxism is something that a majority of Austrian voters could support. At this point Babler backed off. Interviewer: "So you're not a Marxist after all?" Babler: "No, not at all. If you interpret it that way."

atoav 3y ago

And the winner is "January 3rd 2023"

robertlagrant 3y ago
The first person to change their legal name to #NAME? wins.

irthomasthomas 3y ago

A series of excel errors, including failure to copy down a formula to the whole column, led many governments to adopt a policy of economic austerity. The spreadsheet had demonstrated that, historically, countries that adopted austerity came out of recession faster. Once the errors in the spread where fixed, it actually proved the opposite. But by then the damage was done. Edit: It was UMASS grad students that spotted the spreadsheet errors by these Harvard/IMF heavy weights:) Reinhart and Rogoff kindly provided us with the working spreadsheet from the RR analysis. With the working spreadsheet, we were able to approximate closely the published RR results. While using RR’s working spreadsheet, we identified coding errors, selective exclusion of available data, and unconventional weighting of summary statistics. https://peri.umass.edu/fileadmin/pdf/working_papers/working_papers_301-350/WP322.pdf https://peri.umass.edu/fileadmin/pdf/working_papers/working_... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Growth_in_a_Time_of_Debt https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Growth_in_a_Time_of_Debt

skeaker 3y ago
Is there an article for that? It sounds like it could make for an interesting sort of butterfly-effect story.
- PlatinumHarp 3y ago
  https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2013/apr/18/uncovered-error-george-osborne-austerity https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2013/apr/18/uncovered-e...
musha68k 3y ago
Wow, was this widely reported? Do you have sources?
- croes 3y ago
  [flagged]
- smeyer 3y ago
  Yes, it has been widely reported. If you do an online search for something like "rogoff excel" you can see reporting all across mainstream media.

croes 3y ago

Excel and ChatGPT have lot in common, great tools but easy to be used wrong or the wrong purpose. Especially because it seems so easy to get results.

antiloper 3y ago

They discovered this during a recount that only happened because someone noticed a different calculation error in the official result [1] ("Hans Peter Doskozil" + "Andreas Babler" should add up to "Gültige Stimmen" (valid votes) but didn't). The current goverment is very unpopular, but the SPÖ in the opposition has failed to capitalize on that and is currently polling below the governing ÖVP [2]. This incident will not help. [1] https://twitter.com/MartinThuer/status/1664992876231639042 https://twitter.com/MartinThuer/status/1664992876231639042 [2] https://apa.at/produkt/apa-wahltrend/ https://apa.at/produkt/apa-wahltrend/

mschuster91 3y ago
> The current goverment is very unpopular, but the SPÖ in the opposition has failed to capitalize on that and is currently polling below the governing ÖVP [2]. This incident will not help. That's because the SPÖ has made the same mistake that the German SPD or French and Italian PS did: they went away from their worker roots and aligned themselves with corporatist ideals (i.e. neoliberalism). No surprise that their electorate eroded together with the wealth and life quality of said electorate thanks to wage stagnation. Babler is an actual social democrat in name and politics. I am pretty sure he will manage to turn around the party's fate - and hopefully, also be an example towards our social democrats, I'm sick of Olaf Scholz and his cuddling with the FDP.
- idiotsecant 3y ago
  I would argue this is the inevitable result of all political entities. They get captured by the richest parts of the system they're supposed to rule over. This happens to left and right leaning organizations, the only difference is what kinds of undesirable policies result. This is why a political system that lets parties be born and die naturally is preferable to the US two-party system. We're stuck with a choice between two vampires.
  - heresie-dabord 3y ago
    > political entities [...] get captured by the richest parts of the system they're supposed to rule over. This is expressed well. To be complete, we could say, Political parties in a country are subverted at all levels by robust economic interests, and subverted at the federal level by robust regional economic interests, which in turn subverts the national interest.

timcavel 3y ago

[dead]

RcouF1uZ4gsC 3y ago

I would guess that the average in use Excel spreadsheet has fewer errors than the equivalent custom written app. I would also guess that it is far more understandable to far more people than the equivalent custom written app. It is also likely far easier to modify for far more people than the average custom written app. With regards to unit testing, do you test your unit tests? My guess is that the average excel spreadsheet has fewer errors than the average unit test.

dvdkon 3y ago
Your guesses seem suspect to me. I'll take a small Python script with a loop over a spreadsheet any day.
- Macha 3y ago
  Especially when you consider stuff like "Oh I want all the rows, but only know how to type in exact cell references. Ehh, 100 rows should do", and someone misses that their totals for a 10 year period are only including the first 8 and a bit years.

jkepler 3y ago

This isn't the first time spreadsheet errors have messed with election results. It was a column error in tabulated election results that cause all the conflict in 2020 in Antrim county, Michigan. Any computer folks who took the time to read the report by an University of Michigan computer scientist hired by the Republican chaired bipartisan committee that the Michigan state senate would have seen that there was no vote fraud, but user error that got caught almost immediately in the accountability systems that were in place to catch any errors like that. If we stopped trying to report election returns in real time like sporting events, and could be patient a few hours, we could avoid a lot of these highly divisive controversies.

listenallyall 3y ago
> If we stopped trying to report election returns in real time ... we could avoid a lot of these highly divisive controversies. At least in the United States, election results were reported the same night for decades and there were very few questions surrounding the truth, even in 2000 people agreed on the need for a recount, even if they disagreed on the methodology or the ultimate result. Only since 2020, all of a sudden results take multiple days and the electorate is supposed to just understand "this is how it is now" and not question anything, despite witnessing major swings in individual states or districts occurring overnight.
- jkepler 3y ago
  I agree things have become far more contentious since 2020. Trump's campaign used that controversy to fund-raise for "legal defense" but the small print in his campaign emails I received also said the funds could be used to pay down his campaign debts. If you haven't read the Michigan Senate report (result of an 8-month bipartisan investigation chaired by a Trump Republican), please do. It cleared the air and answered tons of questions for me, seeing the evidence they found and realizing that there are simple, understandable reasons explaining what happened and also explaining the ruckus that resulted from so many people crying fraud but being unwilling to take time themselves to investigate the facts of the matter.
  - 3y ago

B1FF_PSUVM 3y ago

> wrong candidate "Too early to tell."

blop 3y ago

There's actually an annual conference dedicated to Spreadsheet risks, they have lots of Excel horror stories on their website: https://eusprig.org/research-info/horror-stories/ https://eusprig.org/research-info/horror-stories/

ikekkdcjkfke 3y ago

If they made all source material available and a law that makes discrimination against who you voted for hate speech

jkepler 3y ago
Much of it is public record. And if you don't have time to wade through the data, the court cases Trump's campaign litigated provide a wealth of one the record, sworn testimony and evidence.[1] I was amazed to read, for example, in Pennsylvania that when Rudy Giuliani was sworn under oath he told the judge that they were not alleging fraud had occurred in the election, yet in the media and in public he was loudly crying "Fraud!" Follow the facts. [1] You can find the case names to know what to search for here: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-election_lawsuits_related_to_the_2020_U.S._presidential_election https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-election_lawsuits_relat...

jcims 3y ago

Somewhere in the universe there is an accounting of the net effect of Excel errors on the planet. It's probably horrifying.

tragomaskhalos 3y ago

My wife is a school administrator and every year I run a little self-written pipeline for her to munge the local authority's XML admissions data into an Xlsx that the staff can use for planning home visits, class allocation etc. Excel (well strictly speaking it's loaded into Google sheets) really is the only game in town for this kind of thing, but even at this very low level there are many fraught footguns necessitating extremely careful handling. Anyone running an election or an economy off this thing needs their head examined.

ehvatum 3y ago
The R community is fantastic and very helpful for getting started. There is so much peace of mind to be gained by doing everything in R and then using R’s write.xlsx to output the excel sheet for your users. Python+pandas is an ok alternative. The ergonomics are weird, but if you’re familiar with Python, it works enough.

lynx23 3y ago

Well, this does not come as a surprise at all. The digital age totally passed these people without notice. As did many other things. Sad to watch, but this party is killing itself. This is what happens when you no longer can pretend, and would actually need to act, but then it turns out all your minions are pretty incapable of acting properly, so, this is what results...

treeman79 3y ago

[flagged]

mrWiz 3y ago
The implication is that these ballots were then counted in the swing states and added to their results rather than NY's. How would this even work? Each state has different ballots which reflect the races in that state and municipality. Even without any additional checks, trying to count ballots from a different state is like trying to fit a square peg in a round hole.
- Kon-Peki 3y ago
  Don't even bother using logic. Gateway Pundit is fake news. https://www.npr.org/2023/06/04/1171159008/eric-investigation-voter-data-election-integrity https://www.npr.org/2023/06/04/1171159008/eric-investigation...
  - mrWiz 3y ago
    On one hand I know that the facts don't matter and Gateway Pundit only needs to focus on the conclusion, not the evidence. On the other hand, I'm still befuddled by "stories" like this, which are obviously and immediately false to anyone who's voted in a federal election before.

andix 3y ago

The tragedy about it is, that they only had to count 600 votes and had a committee of 20 people for doing that. All 20 people could’ve just counted all the votes, without any „technology“ involved.

andix 3y ago
All the experts said, that usually in such an election the ballots are sorted by candidate, put on stacks of 10s, then combined to stacks of 100s. If they followed this best practice, they would’ve had around 10 stacks, and the result would‘ve been obvious to everyone. (Not so) funny twist: after the election the ballots were put into unsealed bags and were stored in an office where many people had access. So all recounts that are done now, are completely worthless.

EMCymatics 3y ago

Wonderful

wolfi1 3y ago

they counted the ballots of every box separately and used excel to add the numbers together, that's not an excel error (it were about 600 ballots altogether, so pencil and paper would have sufficed)

efitz 3y ago

I can’t believe the election disinformation being posted here. That was the fairest election in history. We shouldn’t be spreading conspiracy theories about election software or operator errors. I learned all this I 2020.

logdap 3y ago

[flagged]

gsich 3y ago

This is not an Excel error. It's user error. Don't blame software like it's some force of nature that you can't control.

gsich 3y ago

This is not an Excel error. It's user error. Don't blame software like it's some force of nature that you can't control. Confusing names is not something Excel can prevent.

Galacta7 3y ago

This reminds me of the Excel scoring error by NASA that impacted where the Space Shuttles would be retired. Basically costing the National Museum of the U.S. Air Force an orbiter (though the NASA Administrator says it wouldn't have made a difference in the end). It was a bad enough screwup that Congress complained and NASA's OIG filed a report on the incident. It's a pretty interesting read: https://oig.nasa.gov/docs/Review_NASAs_Selection_Display_Locations.pdf https://oig.nasa.gov/docs/Review_NASAs_Selection_Display_Loc...

perlgeek 3y ago

Ok, that's embarrassing, but good on the for still having real votes, I guess? Here in Germany it's far too common for political parties to decide such things ahead of elections behind closed doors, and then the election is only there to show the party's support for the new leader. Which annoys me to no end, because it defeats the whole purpose of the democratic process.

throwaway106382 3y ago

[flagged]

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

de6u99er 3y ago

That's quite embarrassing. I personally am happy that my favored candidate has won in the end. People need to stop using this horrible tool. I have watched people doing things in Excel in seconds for stuff that would take me multiple minutes. Main difference is me checking if results after each transformation are plausible. I wonder how often such "Excel-Errors" led to wrong decisions.

mo_42 3y ago

I think Microsoft should improve Excel in several ways. Especially, there should be version control and a possibility to review code. Sometimes I see super complex Excel calculations. The code is barely readable because it’s in this tiny text area. These people are real programmers. But they are constrained by a tool. That would also be the alternative if Microsoft doesn’t improve this. Switch over to version controlled and reviewed code in R, Python, …

elmolino89 3y ago
In any Excel sheet everything is mixed up: you got raw data, calculated values, formulas, formatting, plots etc. With a Jupyter notebook you have these well separated, and there is a little chance that someone somehow changed the font in one of the 20k cells with values. Scaling up plots or changing the color scheme are explicit: you must have a cell changing the defaults. Yu can not just muse over some cell, press Del and plonk it. If you verified say md5 checksum for the raw data file it contains what you expect it to contain. If you follow up actions of an average Excel user, then it is a long chain of mostly purely manual manipulations, like selecting the cells, copy and paste, add color here and there etc. A lot of steps to check and verify. Compared to SQL or data frame manipulations it is too complicated to be really useful IMHO

LatteLazy 3y ago

I love Excel, it's amazing. It should be illegal to use it for any critical issue. We "lost" 1000s of covid cases back in the pandemic here in the UK because the version of excel they were using only had 65k rows. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-54423988 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-54423988

robomartin 3y ago

I cannot overstress just how much attention one has to pay to verification of any results produced using Excel. Don't get me wrong, I think it is a fantastic tool and have been using it for decades. However, I have the scars to prove just how badly it can hurt you. One of the best (worst?) cases was a bug that caused a custom high speed board based on Xilinx FPGA's to have intermittent failures that were very difficult to track down. It was six months of almost 12 hours a day fully engulfed in debugging this FPGA code. I must have re-written it from the bottom up three times during this period. You get to the point where you start to doubt spaces within statements...even when you know damn well they are irrelevant. And then, one day, at two in the morning, while looking at the code that generated coefficients for a set of polyphase FIR filers, and a micro-coded state machine that drove that module, I saw the problem. I made a mistake in the calculations and used ROUND() instead of ROUNDUP(). This caused all kinds of crazy issues, like FIFO's being short by one element and jumps occurring at the wrong time. It was truly maddening. The Verilog code this spreadsheet generated was copied and pasted right into a couple of Verilog modules and compiled into the chip without even looking at it. It worked very well, it just didn't do what we wanted it to do. We still use Excel a lot to help generate code. However, lessons learned over the years made us far less trusting, which is good.