The drama in trying to convert election PDFs to Spreadsheets(markessien.com) |
The drama in trying to convert election PDFs to Spreadsheets(markessien.com) |
Assuming the numbers are correct, then it suggests that most people are easily swayed by their local peers.
Is that common in say the USA?
That feels like a particularly uncharitable interpretation to me.
I think it's more along the lines of that parties and their policies have very different impacts on different regions. So it makes sense to vote on what is beneficial to your region, and a lot of people will agree on that.
So it's not about susceptibility to being "swayed", but genuine policy affecting regions differently.
I hope they get a clear answer and a fair count, and whether they win this time or not, a real shot at cracking up their corrupt, two-party system.
American elections are de-centralised. Each state comes up with its methods. In some, each county. (I'm not sure how publishing a CSV of vote totals would help.)
Great story! Looking forward to some follow up
that quotation is, indeed, fake: https://web.archive.org/web/20220128105324/https://www.polit...
https://www.icirnigeria.org/controversy-as-oxford-terminates...
1.The 2020 protesters did not begin vandalizing property, but government infiltrated the protests by burning cars and maiming people.
2. The Obidient movement encompassed multiple sub movements of which a part of the #EndSARS was one of them. A vast majority of Peter Obi's supporters were not #EndSARS activists.
3. Elections in Nigeria are fraught with treacherous behavior so everyone suspects everything. It's important to be very careful with your communication. There is a lot of desperation in the land and so if in a position of information leverage, the responsible thing is to handle the privilege with care and transparency.
But, I'm left greatly confused -- the article never states whether this changed the result.
It says that halfway through counting Obi was in the lead, but nothing about when finished counting.
And when I look at the spreadsheet, the last row (#3380) appears to be the totals, which lists:
APC LP PDP NNPP
149014 85748 329030 8305
So what point is the article trying to make at the end of the day? Or have I misunderstood the numbers?
However, like you I don't know what the overall results are; I agree that the article could make this clearer.
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/173oHgms6wYy5WKz_i3Lh...
But there doesn't appear to be any file that calculates the nationwide totals.
It just seems like such a strange omission but I'm on mobile and can't add up the numbers from across a ton of different files myself.
APC: 5928825
LP: 4731127
PDP: 4555334
NNPP: 1019045
And for the "unsure" CSVs:
APC: 1308067
LP: 578482
PDP: 736183
NNPP: 513245
LP PDP APC NNPP
4731127 4555334 5928825 1019045
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1HhV9iJxXTU9liAZPIDoM...
...shows 0s in the first row for all candidate parties. But the corresponding photo shows votes for all three:
https://inec-cvr-cache.s3.eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/cached/res...
I hope it's not a mistake and that there's some arcane law/technicality to explain it.
edit: another mistake on row 21, LP should get 25 but it was credited to NNPP:
https://docs.inecelectionresults.net/elections_prod/1292/sta...
If memory serves, some CAPTCHA techniques include showing two numbers to transcribe, where one’s value is already known. If that number is transcribed incorrectly, then the other number’s result isn’t used, and the CAPTCHA fails. Perhaps a similar technique may have also helped here?
>Then we started showing some results we knew to the bots - if they entered wrong numbers, we would stop accepting the results.
It seems like a better approach would be to make them think you were accepting the results, when in fact they were going to the bit bucket. Hackers trying to get into your corporate database should be presented with a table full of false (but plausible) data rather than an error. Let them waste time trying to use all those fake SS numbers or account numbers before they figure out they got duped.
From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ReCAPTCHA:
> The original iteration of the service was a mass collaboration platform designed for the digitization of books, particularly those that were too illegible to be scanned by computers. The verification prompts utilized pairs of words from scanned pages, with one known word used as a control for verification, and the second used to crowdsource the reading of an uncertain word.
So I give you two words to transcribe to prove you are human. I know one of them and I want to know the other.
Atiku Abubakar (second candidate) was a former VP and the president he served under (Obasanjo) still insists the dude remains a monument to corruption.
There's been a coordinated campaign at all levels to rig this election massively and we saw voter intimidation, manipulation in broad daylight, and the acquiescence of foreign governments to it all.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/opposition-files-petiti...
The pictures of all of the voting sites are available, but the country went to chaos to pick a winner. It is crazy , because on the lower level (in voting offices), the vote process was respected and the numbers are trustworthy, but the higher you go and the more corruption happens, as each aggregation of data removes trust to the system.
Some more background: https://ng.usembassy.gov/nigerias-2023-elections/
It just shows that bad solutions often win.
We started late so the results were out when we finished but I think it'll be a good idea to develop software that can parse the PDF results and display them faster than the electoral bodies can. In Kenya, and Nigeria, the delays cause a lot of anxiety
Worse is when the elite is not so wise (sometimes plainly crazy), or the elite loses control to crazy people, adversaries. Or self-induced mass hysteria of the population.
The direct "democracy" that very soon will inevitably be enabled by technology, poses great dangers in the situation where masses are so easily manupulateable, and their collective intelligence seems not raising above individual level, but degrading below it for some reason. Violent chaos, lynch courts, etc.
Sometimes, one person's bug is another person's feature :)
By spot checking just a random 100 votes are correctly tallied, you can be pretty sure the outcome of the election is legit in a > 10M voter country.
How do you do that? I think the only error you could detect is when the tally has fewer votes for a party than what’s in that sample. If so, a fraudster could report 100 votes for every party, and add the remaining to whatever party they want to win.
One such design would be for every vote to have a unique id. When announcing the results, you also publish a list of which vote ids were tallied for which candidate.
Then you have 100 random ids, and the checkers watch those votes all the way from the voter casting them to the final tally.
I know that OCR software is able to read stuff like magazine articles and figure out column layout, embedded charts, etc. It's weird if is nothing to do that with a pdf. Maybe I'll look around or see if I can hack up something.
https://punchng.com/nigeriaelections2023-datti-loses-polling...
What would guarantee that the Obidients would not, in turn, try to inflate the score of the Labor candidate?
I have no idea what’s going on in Nigeria, but I hope the truth (whatever it is) will prevail!
If those in power are against change, I wouldn't want to have to put my trust in electronic voting if I was hoping for change.
I was left with the impression that it is the paper records in this story that led to the unravelling of an attempt to forge the results.
Long live paper ballots.
The manual tallying of paper records is what lead to the attempt to forge the results in the first place. If the results were electronically tallied to generate an official result, then they wouldn't need to recount the whole election to verify the result, just doing a statistically significant random sampling of the polls to recount would be enough.
And second, electronic systems can create a paper trail, just make the electronic machine spit out a paper receipt. Then you have the best of both worlds, you can have instant electronic totals, and then do some random sampling recounts of the receipts to validate the result.
When you introduce technology to eliminate manual counting and paper trails, then transparency is eliminated and you give a green light to fraud, corruption, very juicy contracts and death.
I don't understand what you think electronic voting solves...
They at least capture some photos of the equipment. I wonder if anyone communicated with the individuals.
To explain the $460k he forfeited to the feds for his heroin trafficking indictment [0][1], Tinubu claims to have worked at Deloitte as a consultant & made $850k in pre-tax bonuses a year. Problem is, Deloitte claims he's never worked for them [2] and a director at Deloitte earns $340k, according to Glassdoor [3].
[0]: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-61732548 [1]: https://www.scribd.com/document/345742027/Bola-Tinubu-Heroin [2]: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FhhgxX2WQAAWOVo?format=jpg [3]: https://www.glassdoor.com/Salary/Deloitte-Director-Salaries-...
This in no way undermines your post, broadly. But narrowly, these are sales roles. Two people with the same title at Deloitte can make vastly different incomes depending on their production.
Ahem, somebody tell the U.S. that
From the looks of it, if he runs it, it won't be a democracy
Bola Ahmed Tinubu was born 29 March 1952. He is 70.
Joe Biden was Born November 20, 1942. He is 80.
There are plenty of world leaders that are old and I completely agree with you. Why aren’t there upper age limits? The UK House of Lords, US Congress and US Supreme Court have this problem too.
- Non-responsive (compared to HTML). Allows PDFs to serve as a common standard between other document formats with different resizing logic, like Latex and Word.
- Difficultly of network access from code running inside document. Allows PDFs to generally operate offline. Nobody's brave enough to try to write a single page application in a PDF
- Destroying data structure. Allows forward compatibility with anything that can be displayed statically on a screen. New applications can have different ideas about how tables, text or charts should work but if there's static visual output then it'll convert to PDF. Awareness of say, the structure of tables is precisely what makes it so difficult for say google sheets and excel to stay compatible with each other's new table features. If somebody develops a new language with new characters not even in Unicode it'll still work on a PDF
It's also worth noting that most PDF limitations have the characteristic of making things hard but not absolutely impossible. These escape hatches prevent people with hard requirements from actually moving to a new format.
If it were truly impossible to get invoice data from PDFs people might've shifted to a different format for business transactions. But if it's merely difficult some company will come up with an API that works as a good enough extraction solution whose cost is justified by the other compatibility benefits of PDFs, so the ecosystem stays with PDFs.
You can absolutely do so. Most times however, the desire is to embed the latest cut of info into the PDF, then hand it off to somebody who will not have network access.
t. Been there, done that. Had the end product thrown out because of Adobe's licensing terms. I also met one of the people responsible for the tooling I had to suffer through. I have their address, but they apologized, and explained the internal politics at the time; so I've chilled on the whole crushing their genitalia with a large wrench bit.
Long story short: doable, but
Do Not Follow.
This is not a place of honor.
No great deed was once commemorated here
That which remains is repulsive to us, in our time, as it will be in yours. Vvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvv
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
The trefoil is not an angel. The weird ring things are symbols for infectious waste.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apache_Flex
Not sure if I linked to the right article, but it was basically compiled scripts/code that was embedded into PDF's that could run arbitrary code.
""Apache Flex, formerly Adobe Flex, is a software development kit (SDK) for the development and deployment of cross-platform rich web applications based on the Adobe Flash platform.""
I don’t think we really did. They are a standard for archiving typeset page-based documents.
Of course, paper documents used to be standard for archiving data, and some continue to do so in the form of PDF.
In principle, it is possible to integrate all the structure you want in a PDF (using Marked Content, Structure Attributes and User Properties), but for data (as opposed to document structure) you’d need custom software to generate and interpret that.
You're totally right about PDF being a massive pain in the butt for any other purpose, but unless you have an alternative that handles the basic use case at least as well and other use cases way better, PDF is here to stay.
There's also a CLI if that is more to your liking. If that doesn't do it, there's always the brute-force option of scripting in your language of choice to pull the data out.
(not sure if the documents in OP had several pages, but if you've scanned/photographed a multi-page document, PDF is not that bad of a solution)
It was the standard for scanners until PDF seemed to dominate the scene.
The student just download the app, and it fix the orientation, rotation, bad light, contrast, and many other horrible things that a jpg may have. In particular the orientation and ordering multiple sheets. Also, Moodle has a little more support for pdf than jpg [2].
I don't know how many three letter agencies are reading the stream, but I'm happy that many three letter agencies operative now have a better formation in algebra and calculus.
[1] https://www.camscanner.com/
[2] It depends on how many optional packages your sysadmin installed.
PDF provided more fidelity for printing, had better tooling (it was by Adobe after all), it was cross-platform, could be displayed on the desktop, so it won. The reader was cross-platform so end-users didn't have to mess with installing plugins for various image types. And because everyone in the document creation division(1) used Postscript to print, printing to PDF was super-easy. And at some point everyone had a postscript printer driver on their machine, so printing to PDF because super-easy as well.
It's not an archiving tool, but people use it for archiving...just like the way a spreadsheet isn't a project management tool, but millions of people use it for project management.
At this point the network effects for the PDF file format would make it difficult to replace. With PDF you can practically guarantee(2) that the file will look the same on any device.
(1) This was more true back then than today, probably (2) assuming that you embedded the fonts, and that the reader doesn't suck.
What's funny is I don't think Adobe really makes any money off of PDF; it's an accidental de-facto standard.
This might have been true once, but using Acrobat now is so painful. Of all the apps that work, Apples Preview is my editor of choice and when I’m on Windows I really miss it.
It converts PDFs into a structured JSON format that you can export anywhere using a Zapier or Make automation:
Which is disappointing. Every time I meet an actual Nigerian, I always expect ruffles and platform shoes.
I'm not sure I haven't horribly misunderstood something somewhere...
There have also been funny defcon-talks about messing with attackers about this, by returning all kinds of messed up return codes, slow-lorry'ing the bot, ... I'm kind of wondering if you could SSRF (or rather, CSRF) a bot like this by returning a redirect to e.g. the AWS metadata API... could be a fun topic to mess with.
Assuming you have the bandwidth to absorb the bot load, which sounded like it was an issue here.
It seems one should record all entries, but only update a canonical db if all entries fail to trip automated tampering detections.
The crosschecked results are in KADUNA_crosschecked on line 3800. The image is here: https://inec-cvr-cache.s3.eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/cached/res...
Accredited voters: 276, Registered voters: 750, APC: 98, LP: 54, PDP: 102, NNPP: 11
All that said, I don't think that the results for 276 voters in one polling unit in one ward in one local government area in one state is clear evidence that Obi lacks support. If anything, the fact that OP's CSV matches a (potentially biased) news article gives me more faith in OP's tallies and claims.
(Aside: it seems _easier_ to lose an election in your own polling unit, where variance plays a larger part, than it is to lose on a wider scale.)
Scaling an attack against a computer system is almost the same as doing an attack against a computer system. Few attacks don't scale.
But yeah, if you just print the vote and push it into an urn (while the voter can read it), you'll get the best of both worlds.
Now the person making the vote has to check the receipt matches their input, and they probably don't have a practical form of redress if it doesn't.
Acrobat has always been a really bad PDF editor. I'm not sure why that is, exactly, since their other editing tools were basically industry standard for a long time. All the interactive stuff like fillable forms, etc are probably incredibly hard to build.
When I added up the totals, I got: APC - 7,225,399 LP - 5,286,181 PDP - 5,285,900 NNPP - 1,529,575
Note: I was using a beta version of a new database tool I created to do this.
My tool is designed for people who are not experts but just have a basic understanding of relational tables (e.g. someone comfortable with a spreadsheet) to be able to load a data set like this and analyze it with just a few clicks of a mouse. Using it, I was able to do the whole thing in about 2 minutes.
BTW: When my numbers did not match up with another HN commenter on this thread, I investigated and found a bug in my code. Once fixed the numbers were correct. (I guess that's why it is still in beta!)
Electronic voting doesn't make bad politicians less bad. In this instance, the bad guys were prepared to deliberately remove CCTV so when they sent their goons out at night to shoot protestors there would be no evidence.
"Electronic tallies" are never going to give a free and fair election if those in power are prepared to go that far. Safer to stick with paper ballots and election observers equipped with Mark I eyeballs.
Ballot machines print either a final tally at the end of the day, or print every single vote and automatically drop it into a physical ballot, depending on the threat model of the country in question. Either way the you have partial or total recount.
Let's the clear, you're not really "recounting" the ballots at that point. If the machine is compromised - and we're discussing a situation in which we know CCTV was removed and people were then shot - you have no real idea if the receipt corresponds to the voter's original intent. Or, indeed, if all the receipts from all the voters make it as far as the recount (?)
> Ballot machines print either a final tally at the end of the day, or print every single vote and automatically drop it into a physical ballot, depending on the threat model of the country in question.
How is reprinting the final automated tally supposed to represent a "recount" of the original automated tally?
> Either way the you have partial or total recount.
You really don't. Bits of paper and Mark I eyeballs all the way.
As Tom Scott puts it, "The key point is not is that paper voting is perfect - it isn't - but attacks against it don't scale well"[0].
[0] Why Electronic Voting Is Still A Bad Idea: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LkH2r-sNjQs
Probably because it's much easier (for average users with few tools and skills) to print a PDF than to print any sort of non-page-based (e.g., image) file format and have the resulting sheet of paper match the scanned sheet of paper in terms of scale, orientation, position -- assuming both sheets are the same dimensions. Essentially using the file as an intermediary for physical copying of standard paper documents.
If you want to detect tampering in the central totalling, then all you need is the end of day receipt of each ballot. Exactly like in OP's case.
If you want to detect tampering in a ballot, then you manually recount the individual printed paper votes inside that ballot. That is something that you should do to a random sample of ballots, plus ballots with unusual totals.
> As Tom Scott puts it, "The key point is not is that paper voting is perfect - it isn't - but attacks against it don't scale well"[0].
That is simply not true, large scale paper ballot tampering scales very well to the point of turning elections, and is much easier to pull off because it happens in the fringe where no one is looking (while tampering the electronic system would require pulling your heist in the IT room where everyone is looking).
In many countries, there are many tens of thousands of individual polling stations. A conspiracy to tamper with enough of them to make a difference isn't going to stay secret for very long because it would have to involve too many people. Tampering with paper ballots just doesn't scale, and in most places, election observers with their old-fashioned Mk I eyeballs are allowed to watch what's going on at every stage.
> (while tampering the electronic system would require pulling your heist in the IT room where everyone is looking)
How would we propose that an average human election observer is supposed to detect whether any particular system involved in electronic voting is - or isn't - in the process of "pulling a heist"?
