I call it a “data crime” when someone is abusing or misusing data. When we understand these stories and their implications, it can help us learn from the mistakes and prevent future data crimes. The stories can also be helpful if you must explain the importance of data management to someone.
The Story
While voting in a 2022 election, someone saw candidates from the 2018 ballot included on their ballot. After reporting the issue, there was an investigation to find out what happened and how widespread it was.
The error was confined to a subset of cities in the state and Spanish-language ballots on touchscreen machines. It wasn’t the whole state. It wasn’t paper ballots. I wasn’t English-language ballots.
It was determined that the third-party elections software vendor was at fault. Their only job is elections, so you would think this is something they had mastered.
Anyone who researched the candidates and knew who they were voting for would have been minimally impacted. If their candidate wasn’t listed, they would have reported it, which is probably how it came to the attention of a poll worker or election officer. For people who hadn’t done their due diligence, it’s possible they voted differently than they would have otherwise. We’ll likely never know.
What We Learned
This was a very specific problem — certain cities, Spanish language, and touchscreen machines got 2018 candidates on a 2022 ballot. I’m guessing that this probably tells us the election was run by Excel spreadsheets. We’ve all been there. You need to create a new file, so you pull up the old file, update the information, and save it under a new name. Or do you? My preference is to immediately create a copy with a new name and then start working with the new copy. It seems to reduce the risk a bit.
What probably happened is that the workers in each region had to create the new ballots, which included paper and touchscreen machines. It seems like they probably had four separate files: English paper, Spanish paper, English touchscreen, and Spanish touchscreen. Workers in some regions forgot to update the Spanish touchscreen files.
This is not complicated. It’s basically data entry work done by a company whose only job is elections. Perhaps they hired some new people or used interns. They certainly didn’t do any testing. Testing would have been simple validation that the names were entered correctly and in all files. Sometimes, it’s the easy tasks that get overlooked thinking they couldn’t possibly go wrong. But, it’s also easy to make sure they didn’t.
I’ll also add that I heard this story on the news, but when I checked online for more information, it was hard to locate because this problem has happened more than once.
