tharminc@gmail.com
Date: Fri, 8 Jun 2018 16:42:48 -0400
Early in the counting for the Ontario provincial election on Thursday evening 2018-06-07, I noticed the CBC election site displayed this dynamic table of popular vote numbers:
Party Votes Vote Share
PC 389,435 40.45%
NDP 333,475 34.63%
LIB 174,446 18.12%
GRN 48,022 4.99%
OTH 17,467 NaN%
The "NaN%" survived several on-the-fly updates to the numbers.
When I checked on Friday morning, with final results in, the table was
Party Votes Vote Share
PC 2,322,422 40.63%
NDP 1,925,574 33.69%
LIB 1,103,283 19.30%
GRN 263,987 4.62%
OTH 100,058 1.75%
It's not obvious to me why the first set of numbers should lead to a NaN for the "OTH" parties vote share rather than 1.81%. The page is still there at https://newsinteractives.cbc.ca/onvotes/results if anyone cares to investigate the code, but I don't know how long it'll last. One trusts that this code is purely for display on the CBC website, and has nothing to do with actual vote tallying...
In passing, this election was conducted with paper ballots hand marked and scanned by machine, with the ballots retained for hand recount if necessary, so pretty much Best Practice as I understand it. I don't believe any such recount has been called for.