Maryland results in CSV differ from results published on website

[ghing]

For example, in the 2008 general presidential contest, http://www.elections.state.md.us/elections/2008/results/general/gen_detail_results_2008_4_BOT001-.html, Obama had 332,396 votes in Prince George's county. http://www.elections.state.md.us/elections/2008/election_data/Prince_Georges_County_2008_General.csv lists only 331924 votes. For that particular contest, all the other county numbers match.

[dwillis]

Interesting. Let me check with MD board of elections. It might be that the published HTML page is older. On the other hand, Prince George's County's results say it's 332,396.

[dwillis]

Emailed MD; they are in the process of correcting the issue.

[dwillis]

Per Natasha Walker at MD SBE (and confirmed by me in the CSV), this has been fixed.

[ghing]

Do you know if they corrected only the particular error I mentioned in this issue or if they found and corrected a broader issue that was causing inconsistencies between results? I ask because I found other issues but didn't yet document them. On Apr 21, 2014 9:08 AM, "Derek Willis" [email protected] wrote:

Closed #115 https://github.com/openelections/core/issues/115.

— Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHubhttps://github.com/openelections/core/issues/115 .

[dwillis]

Pretty sure it's just this error they fixed - what else did you find?

[ghing]

Tomorrow, I'll re-run the validations and document the issues here.

On Tue, Apr 22, 2014 at 4:37 PM, Derek Willis [email protected]:

Reopened #115 https://github.com/openelections/core/issues/115.

— Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHubhttps://github.com/openelections/core/issues/115 .

Geoffrey Hing [email protected] 773.969.6436 http://geoff.terrorware.com/ Twitter: @geoffhing

[ghing]

@dwillis, which CSV did you check for the corrected values? For me. http://www.elections.state.md.us/elections/2008/election_data/Prince_Georges_County_2008_General.csv still shows 331,924 instead of 332,396.

[dwillis]

Hmm, I think something must have gotten reverted. I checked that file.

[ghing]

The 2008 general presidential results also differ from the Prince George's County CSV for:

Candidate	CSV votes	HTML votes
McCain	38665	38,833
McKinney	458	460
Barr	513	516
Nader	961	964
...	...	...

At this point, I stopped checking other candidates, but it's likely that there are vote total inconsistencies for other presidential candidates.

I didn't check all other races, but the results were fine at least for the U.S. House District 1 contest. Perhaps the issue is isolated to only the presidential contest.

I also found an inconsistency for Ralph Jaffe (a write-in candidate) in the 2010 general gubernatorial election. The Baltimore City CSV reports 62 votes while http://www.elections.state.md.us/elections/2010/results/General/gen_detail_results_2010_2_BOT003-.html reports 71.

I didn't validate every candidate for every contest in the 2010 general election, but I did check a few results for each contest and found no other errors.