> 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!
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.
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.
I'm with you on taking the more cynical view on this, but there are plausible explanations. Perhaps they based their testing on 2008 data and just people wouldn't understand the testing process so didn't include that part in the explanation.
It's certainly plausible it could have been a screwup using test data. However given the situation in that country it also seems plausible that it could have been a screwup with the fraudulent data. The article did say "flimsy" after all not "demonstrably false."
"In 2009, following his reelection as president, Aliyev passed a referendum which removed the presidential consecutive term limit, thereby allowing him to run for president as many times as he wishes. Opposition claimed this to be a violation of the Azerbaijani constitution and the European convention on human rights.[13] It is widely expected that Aliyev will win the 2013 presidential elections.[14]"
Those "plenty of things" change dramatically from one news source to another. I stopped listening/reading to political news 3 years ago and I feel so happy.
Definitely! It's plausible to me anyway, having been there and done that. :-)
But I can imagine myself in the place of a PR person who doesn't fully understand the technical issues. And somehow it sounds better in the moment to say "that was real data from a few years ago" rather than "that was fake data that we just made up!"
Of course I don't know what actually happened in Azerbaijan, but I can sure relate to the possible scenarios.
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.
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.
I think you're referring to the video, Antipope Francis practices Judaism, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4AMrXtj8AJY. If you pray Jewish prayers and observe Jewish holy days then you are practicing Judaism. I guess this concept is too complex for people like you to understand.
Yes, I'm saying that this is different than that sort of thing. Its not a thing that can be made in to a "shocking video exposing the truth". Its where the supermajority already accepts it as so much the truth that they don't even bother talking about it.
Its the difference between "the pope is secretly a Jew!" and "the wall is there to keep the jealous westerners out of our communist worker's paradise".
It doesn't work that way. In an autocratic country, behavior like this will eventually be rewarded even though they might pretend to punish it at first place. Every corrupted officer in China gets promoted later some time after they are exposed and "punished" if they keep their mouth shut.
Meh. It’s a post-socialist corrupt shithole, not North Korea or Nazi Germany. Some people will lose their jobs, which they kind of deserve for being incompetent anyway. That’s all that will happen.
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.
> 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'.
> 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.
Wow. This is the level of discourse you are bringing? Believe it or not, I chose the AK-47 specifically for the visual it brings to mind and the fact that most people recognize it and its distinctive shape. That it may be a cheap Chinese knock off is immaterial.
Yeah because a low payed govermnt programmer has a huge amount of choice. A dicator ship depends on few people to survive and in general all jobs are somehow connected to goverment. So everybody is more or less helping the goverment.
I would probebly work for the govermnt too, fixing elections or censor data. That for my skill the most efficent thing to do. Would I feel good? No, is it better then starving or doing hard laber? Yes.
So what would you do? Is your does your moral values overpower your will not doing hard laber?
The members of the election commission are almost certainly criminals, but I'm not as convinced when it comes to the guy who pulled the trigger on releasing the data. I can all too easily picture a hapless developer whose family doesn't know where he is.
That's an excellent point. One I completely overlooked. If it's the case this was done intentionally to cause outrage in Azerbaijan, get people complaining and to spark a movement towards a democratically elected government, then I'd consider the guy that released the data a hero.
Because, of course, the people responsible pushing this out are small fry. And people that will be punishing them will be the ones that just "won" the election. I think it's a shame when the peons get punished while the ones stealing the election go on stealing.
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"
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.
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.
I've seen that as well, and there's a large difference between anomalies, fraud, and mistakes that are of questionable impact and a wholesale fraud of a nation's election. It's stupid, it's pure demagoguery that indicates a lack of understanding of both elections.
... so you're telling me that the elections were virtually different, and not actually different. In other words, there were almost some differences between the two.
vir·tu·al·ly ˈvərCHə(wə)lē/ adverb
1. nearly; almost. "virtually all those arrested were accused" synonyms: effectively, in effect, all but, more or less, practically, almost, nearly, close to, verging on, just about, as good as, essentially, to all intents and purposes, roughly, approximately
2. by means of virtual reality techniques.
That would, at least, have been a more plausible cover story than the official one ("The previous elections data was accidentally released" -- even though the candidates were the ones from this election, not the previous one.)
At my company, we populate pre-production data with old production data. If an item number has changed, we have a script that converts the old item into a new item number or drops it altogether. If Product A is no longer sold but Product B is now being sold, the script will convert Product A sales and pricing figures into Product B's data. It's just so we have some "real" numbers to test with. Every few months, this data is refreshed with current (old) data.
Of course, we also have random number generation to populate the fields with junk if we can't get real data (personally identifiable information). In that case, it's just junk that looks like real numbers. This scenario from the article isn't that far outside of what a normal business might do.
> This scenario from the article isn't that far outside of what a normal business might do.
Sure, its something a normal business might do -- but its completely inconsistent with the facts. Neither the numbers nor the candidates matched the previous election. So whatever was released, it wasn't the previous election's data.
Had they said it was test data (whether resulting from rather substantial massaging of prior election data or something else) that would have been, if not necessarily the kind of thing anyone would be inclined to accept implicitly given the totality of the circumstances surrounding elections in the country, at least a superficially plausible explanation of the data released. But that's not what they claimed, they claimed it was the previous election's data.
Developer likely said:
- Oh crap, its test data, I used the current candidates with past elections data just to make sure it was working.
Result in the news after some levels of PR handling people:
- No problem, its just past elections data.
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.
I hope you realize the problems inherent in having the ruling government vet any part of the election software before the election. Makes the whole thing seem less than "independent."
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.
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.
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.
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
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!
"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
"Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon." -- http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
"On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity." -- http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
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.
So instead the results being leaked early via a typewritten page or someone leaking the results early via an email, in this case the results were leaked early from a mobile app. How is that in any way novel or intellectually gratifying?
I've never before heard of election results being leaked (through any medium) before an election has taken place. It sounds like a new phenomenon to me.
Emperor Augustus assured Gaius Malefictus that he would be
elected to the senate: "Don't worry about the elections. I've
made the appropriate arrangements. This day next week, you
will be a senator."
I can't imagine something like that ever happening in the history of politics. Or the results of a boxing match leaked early to the mafia boss before the fight has taken place, or...
Corrective upvote for your previous post since I agree that the level of interest to most HNers is roughly the same as if the leak had occurred via a different medium (calls to mind the Chicago Tribune's famous gaff: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dewey_Defeats_Truman), but I strongly disagree with the second part of your post. This is an extremely rare occurrence--where a faux democratic regime that everyone knows to be authoritarian but which makes the effort to pretend to have elections (unlike, say, China's government which directly states that they don't like the idea of elections where the populace votes) accidentally reveals that its elections are indeed rigged. Many of us find it fascinating, and that's why it's at the top of HN. If you don't find an article interesting, I don't get the point of sarcastically criticizing other users for upvoting. There are plenty of articles on derivative startups that hit the front page of HN every day, but I don't think you typically ask on those threads, "How is that in any way novel or intellectually gratifying?" Just accept that each of us finds some highly voted articles interesting and some not.
This isn't about politics in the sense of it being a debate about policy. This is a funny example of technological misuse exposing a government for rigging an election. Technology and freedom tend to be two of HNers biggest interests, and being interesting to a lot of HNers is the criterion for what's on topic here. If you personally aren't interested in current events, as with any other topics technical or not, you don't have to read those articles.
Perhaps, but I'm not sure how your feeling about what would have been posted in counterfactual circumstances justifies your complaint about what has been posted in the actual circumstances.
I mean, now it sounds like you aren't complaining about what actually was posted being off-topic, but about something that you imagine might have been off-topic which would have been posted had it occurred.
"Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or
sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new
phenomenon. [...] If they'd cover it on TV news, it's
probably off-topic."
Let's see: Politics? Check. Interesting new phenomenon? Nope. Would they cover it on TV news? Check. Conclusion: probably off-topic.
This isn't politics, it just has to do with a government.
Politics would be an article arguing why it's unfair that the President rigged the election. They mention the background political information because THAT'S GOOD JOURNALISM. You need to have that background information about the political climate to understand what's the importance of what's happening.
Are you really trying to suggest that tptacek is looking for political discussion or trying to push a political agenda here? Because it seems pretty clear that the tech angle is the one he and most readers are interested in.
While it is politics, the interest here is the screw up employing new technology during a scam election. Technology that also in turn can be used to further expose just how corrupt some governments truly are.
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.
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.
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?
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.
Why so we can launch missile strikes to help free them from the oppressive regime run by a mentally deranged leader?
Note the similarity with the backstory behind all of our recent military aggression.
The standard American exceptionalist narrative is that much of the rest of the world consists of people who are victims of illegitimate regimes. We should pity them (emphasis on humanitarian sentiment) but then we should feel morally superior and allow our indignation to lead to military strikes intended to help them.
Bottom line: Military strikes, the projection of power into remote corners of the world, are simply acts of aggression no matter how they are spun. They are designed to threaten and intimidate the rest of the world in a way that aids American interests, not to help people.
Why so we can launch missile strikes to help free them from the oppressive regime run by a mentally deranged leader?
- No. So we aren't guilty of taking important events within a country and to a country as of little importance except in how we contextualize them through our own American lens. You know, the stuff of foreign policy hawks always interested in meddling in other nations.
Much of it is just not news. Obviously 3rd world countries are going to have weaker institutions and certain kinds of social problems that first world nations won't have.
Thus there is an endless stream of possible "appalling" stories but many more deeply interesting, geopolitically relevant, culturally relevant stories that never get written. Some are just not sensational/sexy enough, but the larger problem is that our media actively drives the narrative of American exceptionalism mostly through the world news section.
I didn't get that at all. In fact, there's a lot of this same talk about American elections, that e-voting makes it easier to rig an election. There's stories every election year about hacks on electronic voting machines, stories about votes being flipped in the computer, etc. It makes big news (CNN, Fox, BBC, etc) every four years at least.
This article says nothing about America. The multitudes of articles that DO mention America and electronic voting, especially regarding Diebold voting machines, all sound pretty similar.
My point is more general. Look at the "world news" section of a major newspaper for a few days in a row. Most of the stories make no sense as actual news.
We are strongly encouraged by our newspapers to be irate about random human rights abuses on other continents. Recall the dehumanization propaganda used by the Nazis. Casting inhabitants of foreign countries as hapless victims is simply a softer version of the same propaganda technique.
Once we view them as sufficiently dehumanized (they mistreat their women, they lack voting rights, they have ballot corruption, they utilize child labor, have beliefs based solely on religious dogma, etc. etc.) it becomes significantly easier to launch missiles at them. This propaganda strategy is broadly applied to entire swaths of the world.
Your point being that making a spectacle out of election fraud in a different country should only seek to hide the fact that the American system is flawed in other ways? I'd agree with you, but then we'd both be wrong.
It is possible to question the integrity of one's own government whilst also highlighting atrocities committed in other countries. Countries that also contribute to the global economy.
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!