
Oops: Azerbaijan released election results before voting had even started - tptacek
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/worldviews/wp/2013/10/09/oops-azerbaijan-released-election-results-before-voting-had-even-started/
======
Stratoscope
> The data were quickly recalled. The official story is that the app's
> developer had mistakenly sent out the 2008 election results as part of a
> test. But that's a bit flimsy, given that the released totals show the
> candidates from this week, not from 2008.

This is horseshit.

I spent years building US and international election results maps for a large
company, and I had _exactly_ the same thing happen to me on at least one
occasion.

When you build an election map or any kind of election reporting site or app,
you have to have test data ahead of time. You _can 't_ use test data from a
previous year, for the simple reason that it has the wrong candidates and
parties.

How do you know your code even works with the current candidates? Maybe
there's an encoding problem with one of the candidate names this year.
Happened to me.

You have to use test data from the _current_ election, yes, the election that
has not yet happened. Because you have to test your app with the current
candidates, photos, parties, news feeds, electoral boundaries including all
the latest redistricting, and all of that.

So yes, it is _made up_ test data, with "predicted" results based on whatever.
Recent polling plus a good dose of randomization, perhaps.

You just hope and pray that your test data never leaks out onto a live feed.

But it's a balancing act. You need to test your code on real devices, real
browsers, and the whole works. And you have to be ready to swap in your live
feed election night and have it all work seamlessly.

Should be easy, right?

Now consider the dynamics of election reporting. You have a deadline. A
deadline that _will not budge_. You do your best, but you're probably not
going to get much sleep the week before the election. And sometimes you make a
mistake.

That happened with one of the US primary elections. We had a test feed leak
out onto a live page for a couple of hours, and man did it make the news. They
said we'd released the election "results" early - i.e. we'd made up the
results.

Well of course we made up the results. It was _test data_ , and we had to do
it that way. So yeah, sorry we goofed, but anybody with an ounce of sense who
wasn't looking for a news scoop should have realized that _the election hadn
't happened yet_ and it was just a stupid bug.

People talk about deadline pressure. You should try election work sometime!

~~~
stavrianos
If the data was generated for testing and escaped accidentally, why not say
that? Their claim that it's last year's data runs directly counter to this
perfectly reasonable explanation.

~~~
Stratoscope
That's a very good point, and of course you flag your test data with a special
"TEST" flag.

Now remember the lack of sleep for a week before the election, and imagine a
possible bug where your client code somehow fails to put up that big TEST DATA
message that you thought was there.

It happens. Happened to me. :-)

------
jordanthoms
There's an Onion for that: [http://www.theonion.com/video/diebold-
accidentally-leaks-res...](http://www.theonion.com/video/diebold-accidentally-
leaks-results-of-2008-electio,14214/)

------
noonespecial
Shocked, Shocked!? It couldn't matter less to the average Azerbaijani. They
already know all about it. The government just makes up some ridiculously
implausible "explanation" and life goes on. "Last election's results, but this
election's candidate names?". If it seems like they're not even trying, its
because they're not. The official explanation doesn't even have to be good
because the people don't care one way or another.

~~~
iterationx
We have our hoaxes in the US as well

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cf84Hwo_Umk](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cf84Hwo_Umk)

~~~
JamisonM
Is this a parody youtube account? On top of US election conspiracies Pope
Francis is a Jew? Seriously?

~~~
derleth
Parody or not, there are sedevacantists in the world:

> Sedevacantism is the position, held by a minority of Traditionalist
> Catholics,^[1]^[2] that the present occupant of the papal see is not truly
> pope and that, for lack of a valid pope, the see has been vacant since the
> death of Pope Pius XII in 1958. A tiny number of these claim the vacancy
> actually goes back to the death of Pope Pius X in 1914.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sedevacantism](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sedevacantism)

The belief the Pope is a Jew is a new one on me, but the general tenor of
"There is no valid Pope; the current one is a pretender." is no new idea.

------
bdevine
Snark aside, I feel very sorry for those involved in pushing out the "results"
early. I cannot see anything good happening to them.

~~~
coherentpony
They are criminals. Why on Earth should anything 'good' happen to them as a
result of this?

~~~
nwh
I doubt it was the programmers intention.

Sit back and realise that somebody is probably going to be murdered for
pushing to the wrong database.

~~~
emilsedgh
Somebody who was involved with fixation of election results :)

Not that I think he deserves being murdured. Of course not.

But, he was betraying his fellow countrymen by 'pushing to a database'. I dont
think he really deserve's that sympathy.

~~~
SoftwareMaven
If you've got two guys with AK-47s standing behind you, do you get a choice in
the matter? Even if they aren't standing behind, the implication is that they
are there when a despot comes to you for an app.

Maybe the early release was civil disobedience.

~~~
dingaling
> If you've got two guys with AK-47s standing behind you

I know it sounds technical to use such a precise level of designation, but
there are very very few AK-47s in circulation. Their production ended in 1959.

As with any domain of knowledge it's best to dither to a lesser degree of
precision if you're not an expert. 'Two guys with rifles'.

~~~
DanBC
> there are very very few AK-47s in circulation.

([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AK-47](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AK-47))

> _Even after six decades the model and its variants remain the most widely
> used and popular assault rifles in the world because of their durability,
> low production cost, availability, and ease of use._

------
tptacek
Today I love computers so much.

Tomek in my office says we'd doc this "sev:hi - production data stored in test
instance".

~~~
angersock
Yep.

For my customers, that was the day that the election results came out a day
early and conclusively proved that there was no hope of ever having a
democratic government.

For me, that was just another Tuesday--"git push production --force"

:)

~~~
ihsw
`git push` implies that there were any changes to commit.

`git reset --hard origin/despotism` would be more accurate, since it over-
writes any commits not yet pushed.

~~~
angersock
Hah, well put. I clearly am not used to committing great evil with git--on
purpose, at any rate.

------
the_watcher
I bookmarked this to look at every time I get too depressed about American
politics.

~~~
csomar
Sorry, as a country that got recently the Freedom of speech, politics and all
that B.S.; I do consider the freedom of moving and travelling (without being
harassed) to be orders of magnitudes more important.

Freedom to move and travel is a necessity.

Freedom to speech is good, but not really that necessary.

~~~
tanzam75
If you have freedom of movement, then you can move to a place that has freedom
of speech.

If you have freedom of speech, then you can grumble about being prohibited
from traveling. But you are highly unlikely to have the influence to get the
law changed.

------
bratao
Couldn't this be just fake data that the developer used to test the app ?

~~~
phogster
I was thinking the same thing, but then why would the numbers be so skewed as
to mirror pretty much what corrupt election results would look like?

~~~
Zikes
Because it was probably presented to senior politicians prior to being
released, and they'd want to see "optimistic" test data.

~~~
icambron
Yeah, it would look subversive on the part the developer. Not a good career
move in the best of circumstances, which these are clearly not. I could
definitely see this happening with the developer's best intentions, and not as
part of a rigging conspiracy.

None of that is to say that Azerbaijan's democracy isn't largely fake or that
the elections are not, in fact, rigged; it's just that this particular mistake
may not an expression of it.

------
JDDunn9
Call me old-fashioned, but I believe if you're going to fix an election, it
should be done with lots of money and empty campaign promises! The public must
be involved. Not in a meaningful sense, just as pawns in a larger corporate
agenda.

------
mistermcgruff
This is why I stopped incorporating Event Horizon's gravity drive into my
apps. Kept getting results from the future. And hell, that too.

------
ambrice
Nate Silver did the same thing prior to the 2012 U.S. elections..

------
austinz
If they're not competent enough to blame this mishap on 'test data', I wonder
if they'll prove competent enough to change the data for the final reported
results.

------
auctiontheory
I'm old enough to remember when tyrants won with 99% of the vote. Perhaps the
real news in this article is that nowadays they only win with 73%.

------
dsrguru
Why isn't this the main election story (or even on the first page) when you
search Google News for Azerbaijan?

------
exo_duz
This is a facade of democracy like in a lot of other countries. They just try
to make it seem like there is democracy but behind it all it's still
controlled by the ruling party.

------
hisabness
Sounds like the 2000 US elections...

------
Systemic33
Is it just me, or does that photo look as if the president is added in
photoshop?

------
polemic
The Azerbaijan election results app was built by Jeff Dean.

;)

------
linux_devil
More embarrassing than wardrobe malfunction

------
iterative
Proving once again he's prescient, Ali G suggested reporting on election
returns the day before, during his excellent interview with Andy Rooney
several years ago:
[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KglSPl7g14Q](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KglSPl7g14Q)

------
djvu9
In China your life is even easier: the government helps you keep and fill in
the voting paper. And they are so efficient that you get the results 8 years
before the "election" happens. Good thing is that Obama administration and US
people are working hard to catch up. Don't worry!

------
coherentpony
I'm getting really tired of the politics posts on here. Can we please stop
upvoting stuff like this? If I want to be outraged I'll go to /r/politics.

~~~
staunch
_" If your account is less than a year old, please don't submit comments
saying that HN is turning into Reddit. (It's a common semi-noob illusion.)"_
\--
[http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

~~~
coherentpony
_" Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're
evidence of some interesting new phenomenon."_ \--
[http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

~~~
enraged_camel
As a rule of thumb, when someone who has been a user here for over 6 years
cites one of the guidelines, it is a _really bad idea_ to get into a citing
match with them. You will just get embarrassed, like you are now.

~~~
pyrocat
guys

guys my regdate

guys

------
grandalf
In other words, America is so un-corrupt and perfect, let's create a spectacle
out of every similar story that takes place around the world so that Americans
don't question the legitimacy of American institutions.

The implicit storyline is American exceptionalism, which is most valuable when
it can be used to justify wars and military action that would otherwise be
considered inappropriate or morally questionable.

When you consider what percentage of so-called "world news" is stuff like
this, newspapers start to seem like they are all state run propaganda
operations. I realize that part of it is just the entertainment value people
derive from feeling superior to others, even when the others are presented as
victims, but an objective, critical media would simply ignore most stories
like this in favor of less juicy but more impactful stories about
local/national issues.

~~~
krapp
So what you're saying is, any political story that isn't explicitly about
American corruption... is implicitly about American corruption?

~~~
grandalf
It's propaganda designed to create a mental state in the reader, namely that
the US is great. We don't print the text of national hymns in our newspapers,
we just print nearly every silly or bad thing that happens in any other
country, even in the midst of much more significant/abhorrent conduct by our
own government.

It's propaganda and nothing more. It's useful both for distraction and
dehumanization.

~~~
krapp
And I suppose if we only printed things about our own country you'd probably
castigate the US for arrogantly ignoring the rest of the world. Or that if
other countries report on American corruption and social problems, it's not
equally an attempt at deflecting from their own issues? Maybe we should only
print positive news about others and negative news about ourselves?

~~~
grandalf
I think your definition of "news" is basically this kind of story...

As a thought experiment, imagine if American readers of the "world news"
section routinely were led to think things like "Hmm, I wonder what would
happen if our policymakers tried that idea" or "wow, maybe the people in
country x are just like me and deserve my profound respect, even though my
country is launching missiles into their neighborhoods".

Illegal immigrants are dehumanized in the American press too, as are sex
workers. The point of creating psychological/empathic distance between the
reader and the subject is to permit the reader to suppress the basic reflex of
valuing human life. Imagine the news story about an illegal immigrant sex
worker who was found murdered.

