RISKS-LIST: Risks-Forum Digest  Wednesday 21 May 1997  Volume 19 : Issue 17

   FORUM ON RISKS TO THE PUBLIC IN COMPUTERS AND RELATED SYSTEMS (comp.risks)
   ACM Committee on Computers and Public Policy, Peter G. Neumann, moderator

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Date: Tue, 20 May 97 16:11:03 EDT
From: msb@sq.com (Mark Brader)
Subject: Election Reporting in a NaNy State

During my recent vacation in Britain, I picked up the 3 May 1997a issue of
*The (London) Times*, with its 16-page pullout section giving the complete
results of their general election two days before.  I had happened to see on
TV the results from Putney, where 10th-place Derek Vanbraam polled just 7
votes out of 43,995 cast there, I was naturally curious to see whether
anyone had done worse.  Apparently nobody did.  But while I was looking
through the section, I found something rather more interesting:

      SKIPTON & RIPON
      C Hold
      Electorate 72,042 (70,154)        %Votes
      + Curry, D (C)                 0    NaN
      Marchant, R (Lab)              0    NaN
      Mould, T (LD)                  0    NaN
      Holdsworth, N (Ref)            0    NaN
      ---------------------------------------
      C Majority                     0    NaN
      ---------------------------------------
      Total Vote 0              Turnout 0.00%

followed by the presumably correct votes from 1992, and further information
about the "winner" David Curry.  The "+" means that Curry was already an MP
and "majority" is British for his plurality or margin of victory.  A slender
margin indeed! :-)

Of course, most of us here will recognize NaN as Not a Number, the result
of dividing 0 by 0.

According to the BBC web site, the actual results for the seat are:

      Curry, David       Con     25,294  46.50%
      Mould, Thomas      LibDem  13,674  25.20%
      Marchant, Robert   Lab     12,171  22.40%
      Holdsworth, Nancy  Ref      3,212   5.90%
      Majority 11,620 

So the Times did in fact list the correct winner -- but it appears that they
did so only by accident.  I'm not sure what order the candidates were shown
in; it might be alphabetical by parties, or in order of the expected finish
of the parties, or something completely arbitrary.  In any case it isn't
their actual order of finish, or alphabetical order, though it's close to
both.

The BBC web site reports are also wrong, though in a more subtle way.
Notice that coincidental column of zeroes at the far right?  That's no
coincidence: it's a bug.  The column should read 46.54%, 25.16%, 22.39%, and
5.91%.  The same sort of thing is shown for other constituencies: poor Derek
Van Braam (as they spell it -- I don't know who's right) is shown with 0.00%
of the vote in Putney, when in fact he got nearly 0.02%!  All together now:
"Hey Pat, I know there's no time to test it, but could you just change that
program to print one more decimal place?"