An Excel error led Austria's SPÖ to announce the wrong candidate as the winner | Hacker News Reader

An Excel error led Austria's SPÖ to announce the wrong candidate as the winner

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395 pointsvinnyglennon190 comments

A series of excel errors, including failure to copy down a formula to the whole column, led many governments to adopt a policy of economic austerity. The spreadsheet had demonstrated that, historically, countries that adopted austerity came out of recession faster. Once the errors in the spread where fixed, it actually proved the opposite. But by then the damage was done.

Edit: It was UMASS grad students that spotted the spreadsheet errors by these Harvard/IMF heavy weights:)

  Reinhart and Rogoff kindly provided us with the working spreadsheet from the RR analysis. With the working spreadsheet, we were able to approximate closely the published RR results. While using RR’s working spreadsheet, we identified coding errors, selective exclusion of available data, and unconventional weighting of summary statistics.

https://peri.umass.edu/fileadmin/pdf/working_papers/working_...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Growth_in_a_Time_of_Debt

In addition to their excel errors, their analysis required excluding the Australia, Canada, and New Zealand. Once these countries were included in their analysis, their argument falls apart. To me, it's clear that this was a case of very selective researcher degrees of freedom to support austerity. Why anyone would take Reinhart or Rogoff seriously after this farce is beyond my comprehension.

> their analysis required excluding the Australia, Canada, and New Zealand. Once these countries were included in their analysis, their argument falls apart

Unsure on Oz and Canada. But New Zealand was excluded due to gaps in R&R's data at time of their first paper's publication. They "fully integrated the New Zealand data back to the early 1800s" as well as for "every major high debt episode for advanced countries since 1800" for their 2012 paper [1].

The effect size that Herndon et al found is "growth at high debt levels" being "a little more than half of the growth rate at the lowest levels." R&R's 2012 paper finds an even more-muted result: "2.4% for high debt versus 3.5% for below 90%."

[1] https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/interactive/2013...

It's almost like there are people who are eager to force austerity whether or not it works!

In case it's useful to anyone: google sheets' lambda[1] and map[2] functions have prevented a ton of fill-down issues for me. Plus the ability to use a whole column without specifying number of rows (e.g. "A1:B" instead of "A1:B1000")

Those functions + a little bit of custom app script have helped me (not very technical) get pretty far in building maintainable data pipelines, reporting, etc. in gsheets.

[1] https://support.google.com/docs/answer/12508718 [2] https://support.google.com/docs/answer/12568985

All of this is available in Excel by the way.

Oh, I didn't realize they had map now -- thanks!

The "traditional" Excel solution is Array Formulas.

But Index/Match doesn’t play nice with array formulas :/

You could do that in Excel, but Data Tables are the better way.

I think Excel Tables make a ton of sense, especially if you're using PowerQuery or other built-in data connections to populate the sheet.

But for Google sheets, I've yet to find something as flexible and maintainable as map/lambda -- especially when I'm doing things that are pretty... egregiously hacky, but better suited to gsheets than excel (I still prefer Google's realtime collaboration to Microsoft's).

Two of those 3 sound intentional: selective exclusion of data and unconventional weighting. The "coding errors" may also have been intentional. I would suggest more scrutiny of the authors and their motives before dismissing as "Excel errors, whoops"

Here was their response FWIW [0]

[0]: https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/interactive/2013...

wow, that sure does make me come away with a different opinion than I had just reading the other posts above.

Thanks for taking the time to find this.

I think it's more likely that if that paper had never been published the government would have advertised a different pretext for the decision they wished to make anyway.

True, but the paper reduced opposition. I was surprised by the paper at the time, but given the authors considered it a useful analysis. I was quite relieved when the error was discovered

> Once the errors in the spread where fixed, it actually proved the opposite

No, it did not. It simply moderated the effect [1].

[1] https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/interactive/2013...

> According to the UMass scholars, the “corrected” number is positive 2.2 percent—which means GDP still grows, even when debt levels are very high.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2013-04-18/faq-reinh...

and from the rebuttal:

> The authors show our accidental omission has a fairly marginal effect on the 0-90% buckets in figure 2. However, it leads to a notable change in the average growth rate for the over 90% debt group.

Was it this one by Kenneth Rogoff?

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2013-04-18/faq-reinh...

Germany was and is still fooled by it. That is why Greece was treated the way it was after the Lehman crash in 2008.

That was for parties to save face after investing in Greece. They just wanted their money back without having to recognize the investments were not good quality, as stated. Luckily, all the stereotypes about the lazy south were handy.

Privatized the profit, mutualized and nationalized the debts to bail out the banks, and threw Greece under the bus for good measure.

And to stump them in the ground a even more, told them they didn't deserve a bail-out because they would spend it on drinks and prostitutes anyway..

It's the same with corruption. The Greece people know about their corruption, Germans mostly ignore it therefore the position in the corruption index. For instance they completely ignored who bribed the greece companies and politicians.

> Germany was and is still fooled by it. That is why Greece was treated the way it was after the Lehman crash in 2008.

With or without that study, Greece would have been treated this way. Saving money is burned so much into German culture that none of the recent German ministers of finance can forget their microeconomic views and adopt macroeconomic views.

This goes way back to the end of the 1920s when the German government decided to save money during the great depression.

Also, in Berlin there was a museum about saving money [1].

[1]: https://www.dhm.de/en/exhibitions/archive/2018/saving/

That's right but the infamous 60% debt limit gave them some kind of scientific reasoning.

I have done excellent work in O365 Excel that is later muddied by concurrent/other editors.

Half the time I'm correcting cells where a user navigated to the wrong one and replaced the formula. What's more frustrating is when I develop a BETTER formula to use for the entire column, but there's no easy way to replace it all and I actually want to preserve previously calculated values. (I preserve values for historical accuracy, even if the formula then was not-great.) Makes me think Excel needs git-like version control for rows/records, and the ability to query things like last-modified of a cell, etc.

I have copied everything in the column out to a temporary spreadsheet then paste-by-value to put it back, once the correct formula is set throughout. That's tedious and error-prone and sometimes I lose the dumb historic coloring that previous editors wanted (I preserve what I can) and log why this changed as the maintainer changed. Am I doing this wrong?

There's no easy way to spot holes/changes in formulas as you scan down the column: You can use the Review tab option to show Formulas, but if the formulas are largely the same (start the same but are very long), you're unlikely to spot the difference. This could be thousands of rows to scroll through, or the last hundred you're concerned with. Seems like there should be a better way.

I want an easy table protection option to require that 'this formula will be the only formula in this column'. Table protection is so lacking. You can't protect a column to say "only computed values exist here". You protect the column, and it prevents users from entering a new row/record, making a mistake, and deleting the row to try again. We train folks: If you mess up the next row, just delete the entire row and attempt to add it back. The computed columns/values will be there for you. Protecting a column makes this impossible.

Online Excel is advancing.. but I want too much. I feel like there's been low-hanging fruit for years and it's no wonder all these alternatives are good enough to replace Office.

IMHO instead of ramming a square peg into a round hole one may think of switching from Excel to i.e. Jupyter notebook(s). Keep the raw data separate from the calculations/visualizations and get a more trackable environment.

You may also pinch out bunch of functions as separate scripts in a git repo and share these between various notebooks/people.

Calculate md5 checksums of raw data files. If values in rows can be modified, get the hash sums (xxhash?) per row. That way even with the lowest common denominator (text CSVs) you know if the inputs changed and where.

For larger data consider storing it in parquet format and using duckdb.

Assuming that you must have Excel output calculate what's needed using raw data, notebooks/scripts then output Excel using openpyxl

> A series of excel errors, including failure to copy down a formula to the whole column, led many governments to adopt a policy of economic austerity.

I can't help thinking that if a single published paper can lead to a national policy of austerity then the problem is not with the paper ...

Sounds more like an excuse to never reform the country to me. By that logic in bad times you shouldn't do the necessary reforms. And since they aren't done in good times either.

Is there an article for that? It sounds like it could make for an interesting sort of butterfly-effect story.

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2013/apr/18/uncovered-e...

The wikipedia link you cite disagrees that it “proved the opposite”

> Further papers … which were not found to contain similar errors, reached conclusions similar to the initial paper, though with much lower impact on GDP growth.

Who does austerity benefit? Why did they drive governments towards austerity?

De facto, austerity tends to be used to argue for cuts to social programs and reduced investment in common goods or to argue for privatization of common goods.

This tends to benefit the top 0.1%: The living situation of the the majority is worsened and their bargaining position for employment is weakened. Privatization leads to private profits that overwhelmingly go to the top 0.1%, and of course there's a direct power aspect to it as well. If you literally own the regional electricity provider, for example, that gives you direct political power that goes beyond the mere profit you can make from this ownership.

Technically, it doesn't have to be that way. For example, austerity could theoretically be used to argue for much higher top-end marginal income taxes and capital gains taxes as well as wealth taxes. But political constellations being what they are, that's usually not how it plays out.

When productivity is low and not growing much, disproportionally high public spending can possibly lead into a death spiral. Case in point Britain in the 70s. Or Venezuela nowadays. There is no need to swing into extremes, though austerity policies during a global crisis is probably one the worst things you can do if there are other options available.

Death spirals are fine if you can make sure you're not personally impacted by them. In fact it makes it much cheaper to buy out large swathes of the dying/dead economy, privatize failing public services and drive down labor costs. You don't even have to both reviving the economy afterwards if you can get a quick exit by selling to a greater fool.

> Death spirals are fine if you can make sure you're not personally impacted by them

Can also be prevented with hard to necessary reforms accompanied by significant spending cuts. Public spending alone can prop-up the economy and outside of raw resources and infrastructure government owned companies tend to be very in-competitive.

Just look at what happened with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Leyland. British workers were half as productive as their German or even French counterparts...

I'm sorry, are you genuinely trying to argue for austerity ("hard but necessary reforms accompanied by significant spending cuts") in a thread that literally started with someone posting information debunking the scientific basis for claims that austerity works? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36199042

Also I'm not sure what your link seeks to demonstrate. The article says British Leyland was nationalised in 1975 but its history section starts out stating that it was formed in 1968 by the merger of BMH and LMC and that BMH was "periously close to collapse". The article shifts a lot of the blame for its failure on strikes and the company being too poorly organized to withstand them but the continuous failure of BMH following the merger is a running theme. The reason it was nationalised is also suggested to be that it was facing bankruptcy while representing almost the entirety of the UK automobile market.

Honestly, if anything BL's history reads like an example of aggressive mergers/buy-outs ruining an industry through monopolization and the tax payer ending up having to foot the bill to bail out the company so half the economy doesn't collapse with it. If the LMC-BMH merger hadn't gone through, BMH would have failed on its own instead of growing into an integral part of BL and taking the entire company with it to the point that the government had to step in and keep it on life support long enough to start selling parts off for scrap.

> I'm sorry, are you genuinely trying to argue for austerity ("hard but necessary reforms accompanied by significant spending cuts") in a thread that literally started with someone posting information

I'm sorry, are you genuinely implying that there one-size-fits-all approaches in economics that universally work regardless of the circumstances? And I'm pretty sure your misinterpreting the article or fundamentally misunderstand how statistical models work.

> scientific basis for claims that austerity works

It does work to a degree in certain cases. Or at least in certain situations is the least bad option.

> The article shifts a lot of the blame for its failure on strikes and the company being too poorly organized to withstand them but the continuous failure of BMH following the merger is a running theme

Yes British business weren't competitive because of continuous government interference and dysfunctional yet to influential trade unions. The merger in 1968 was an outcome of government and trade union meddling Leyland was doing fine on it's own and there were no good reason for it to merge with BMH (which was on the brink of bankruptcy) as a result of that both went under eventually..

> Honestly, if anything BL's history reads like an example of aggressive mergers/buy-outs ruining an industry

Yes but these mergers/buy-outs were imposed by the government...

Your points are entirely orthogonal to mine. There may well be cases where net government spending must be reduced -- but that is identical to increasing net government income.

Well some make might argue that 'cuts to social programs' might achieve just that in certain cases.

It benefits those who don't have to pay higher taxes (ie everybody) because of austerity.

Kinda makes me wonder if it was a mistake or a pretext.

Wow, was this widely reported? Do you have sources?

Yes, it has been widely reported. If you do an online search for something like "rogoff excel" you can see reporting all across mainstream media.

They discovered this during a recount that only happened because someone noticed a different calculation error in the official result [1] ("Hans Peter Doskozil" + "Andreas Babler" should add up to "Gültige Stimmen" (valid votes) but didn't).

The current goverment is very unpopular, but the SPÖ in the opposition has failed to capitalize on that and is currently polling below the governing ÖVP [2]. This incident will not help.

[1] https://twitter.com/MartinThuer/status/1664992876231639042

[2] https://apa.at/produkt/apa-wahltrend/

> The current goverment is very unpopular, but the SPÖ in the opposition has failed to capitalize on that and is currently polling below the governing ÖVP [2]. This incident will not help.

That's because the SPÖ has made the same mistake that the German SPD or French and Italian PS did: they went away from their worker roots and aligned themselves with corporatist ideals (i.e. neoliberalism). No surprise that their electorate eroded together with the wealth and life quality of said electorate thanks to wage stagnation.

Babler is an actual social democrat in name and politics. I am pretty sure he will manage to turn around the party's fate - and hopefully, also be an example towards our social democrats, I'm sick of Olaf Scholz and his cuddling with the FDP.

I would argue this is the inevitable result of all political entities. They get captured by the richest parts of the system they're supposed to rule over. This happens to left and right leaning organizations, the only difference is what kinds of undesirable policies result.

This is why a political system that lets parties be born and die naturally is preferable to the US two-party system. We're stuck with a choice between two vampires.

> political entities [...] get captured by the richest parts of the system they're supposed to rule over.

This is expressed well. To be complete, we could say,

Political parties in a country are subverted at all levels by robust economic interests, and subverted at the federal level by robust regional economic interests, which in turn subverts the national interest.

Moreover, the wife of a person near to Doskozil, Michaela Grubesa, was the leader of the election commission, which has its own very strange taste.

Now, never credit maliciousness to what can be credited to incompetence, but you know, it's a lot of small details that make the whole story more bizarre.

Excel still doesn't have any way of doing unit tests or confirming that the content is valid and as it should.

For example: you can have an Excel file with 100k lines and have a formula accidentally replaced by a static number on line 87456. Nobody will ever find it.

> Excel still doesn't have any way of doing unit tests or confirming that the content is valid and as it should.

I make this point when chatting with new team members that say "let's just use X," without really understanding how X works, and I use Excel as the analogy. Most people know how to use an equation field. Most people don't consider writing a spreadsheet programming, but it is.

And just like other types of programs, you can have really insidious bugs, and you need to consider how you'll address those, or address changes in the underlying or internal components of the system.

A famous one is that floating point math in excel can give you different answers for "is this the same as that" depending on how you write the equation, for example.

Starting in 2003 I spent several years as a principal developer developing mobile office software.

When we launched our excel compatible spreadsheet we diligently formalized every function and wrote tests to verify behavior. It was beautiful.

Then we started receiving lots of bug reports from users because our calculations often didn’t match what they were seeing in Excel. Older Excel versions had lots of bugs and Microsoft had been carrying them forward because at that point it was “better” to carry the errors forward and display results people expected rather than fixing them and having everyone confused by the changed results.

So we copied their behavior as best we could. I wish I had the list still but it was long and full of weird edge cases which caused formulas to be incorrect.

Just as Excel carried the Lotus 123 bugs.

https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2006/06/16/my-first-billg-rev...

How did this work out in the end? I imagine it was difficult to decide whether copying bugs was the correct choice.

It absolutely was. At the end of the day our product was measured against fidelity to Excel… so any deviance was always bad for us.

I believe Google made the same choice with Google Sheets even.

Incredible story.

yeah, that's a classic read

>A famous one is that floating point math in excel can give you different answers for "is this the same as that" depending on how you write the equation, for example.

Is this specific to Excel? Floating point math can do that regardless of the platform. Addition on floats isn't associative!

> Is this specific to Excel?

No. And yet they still have situations where excel itself will differ from ieee 754. See https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/office/troubleshoot/excel/...

I've built a unit testing framework for Excel using Python and the openpyxl library. I work in a bank and using Excel was unavoidable in some cases. You'd basically build a test suite for a spreadsheet in Python and run it like a regular test suite. It helped a lot in catching issues. Obviously it would be nicer if unit testing was built into Excel, but it is possible to build side tools around it.

I know a guy who worked at $BIGBANK and did the same with Ruby, he gave us a presentation about it at a local user group meetup many years ago.

IIRC, he was pretty proud of being able not only to have a regression test suite, but also being able to do TDD-excel :)

I completely appreciate that. I was also attempting to tell regular excel users about the virtues of TDD! I had grander plans where I imagined creating centralised test suites that caught more generic issues and anybody in the bank could upload their spreadsheet for validation. It didn't quite get that far though.

Regarding your example, you can protect worksheets and have only some cells unlocked for modification [1].

You can add conditional formatting, VBA procedures, additional formulas etc. to do whatever validation you like. However, you need a software engineer (or someone who thinks like one) to properly implement that, and it’s not exactly fun.

[1] https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/lock-or-unlock-sp...

...and in the year 2525 one still cannot avoid having their users mistakingly copy & paste formatting and thus destroy auto-extending Excel tables...

There are workarounds using VBA, but not via Typescipt - the Excel JS API knows no clipboard.

Do people working in finance / government / other places where Excel heavy fields really not have any tooling for "linting"/"typing" (formula replaced by static number in 1 line, integer displayed as date etc) or "unit testing"?

This sounds like an assumption worth validating, because it sounds like an easy product to sell for lots of money.

Nope.

Source: SO works in a field where they handle other people's money and payroll. Not a small mom & pop shop either.

The employees use Excel sheets handed over from "someone" and just plug in the numbers.

In Britain they messed up the covid numbers because they used the wrong format to store their infection numbers and lost all lines after 65534...

I was paid once to turn an Excel sheet into a basic website because the employees kept inadvertently messing with the formulas...

The startup that became Google Sheets was basically an Excel->HTML conversion tool.

I used to work for a UK government ministry that has a budget in the tens of billions of pounds per year. I can tell you with confidence: no, there really is no linting, typing, automated testing, version control, nor any other tooling that you would consider "table stakes" for software development, when it comes to spreadsheets. Every single policy mechanism of that ministry relies, at some point in the pipeline, on at least one untested spreadsheet full of copypasted formulae, and inscrutable VBA macros passed down through generations. There are quality control reviews, of course, but they're manual. They don't scale. And these spreadsheets are used to make decisions that decide the fates of nearly 70 million people. And that ministry is not exceptional wrt other ministries, i.e. they're all as bad as this.

There were low ranking people who recognized how stupid this all was, and pointed it out. But hardly anyone with decisionmaking power even understood the problem. Nobody had even heard of git. So nothing changed. It was the dark ages, and a major factor in why I quit.

My SO works in accounting, and they really do run without guardrails. And yes there are a ton of different software packages that people can buy for various uses (and do).

The main problem here is that Excel is so very flexible, and everything else is not (generalizing here, but it gets the point across). So the after the third time you are using Excel to handle the exceptional cases, you start to wonder why you are not using it everywhere else.

Of course the counter-problem is that it is so flexible that it accommodates your mistakes without pointing them out.

Of course the actual accounts are normally not in Excel, but in a proper double entry system

Yes.

> This sounds like an assumption worth validating, because it sounds like an easy product to sell for lots of money.

Unfortunately, it's not so simple. I've worked in exactly this field, getting such institutions/companies to adopt this kind of software is ridiculously hard.

Would love to hear your experience on why that‘s the case. Sounds like an idiot proof value proposition to me, considering the damages that could be avoided.

Unfortunately, nothing beats Excel for "agility" and smoothness of the learning curve. You can whip up something that kinda-sorta-works, very quickly, without any software training.

Another thing to consider: we are conditioned to believe that the web browser is a "universal runtime", i.e. it's the thing that everyone has, so you should target it. But actually, it's not the only one. When considering Windows computers (which is all that matters in offices), Excel is a kind of dark-matter universal runtime, for dark-matter IT[1]. Better, it's one that doesn't require a persistent server, or logins, and it's peer-to-peer, in a sense. Everyone has Excel installed, everyone has an org email account, therefore everyone can email xlsm files back and forth, no extra setup required (try doing that with exes). No SaaS offering has that kind of caveman convenience. And you might think -- that's horrifying. But email is the way communication/collaboration actually happens in the median bureaucracy, so Excel's ubiquity and file-orientedness is an insurmountable strength.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadow_IT

A few examples are:

The people are stubborn and many have had experiences with subpar enterprise software. If they are billing clients, any additional step in software is akin to a national tragedy to them. They will complain something is "broken" if it doesn't fit their mental model of what a software should be before trying anything new.

> Do people...

no they don't. Not even for billion dollar scale accounting

> because it sounds like an easy product to sell for lots of money.

Is it Excel though? Because if not, then you're going to have the mother of all uphill battles trying to get it sold.

It would be akin to trying to convince a giant company with hundreds of millions of lines of Java code to rewrite into golang.

There are ways to deal with this: array formulas, using formula inspector, Excel marks inconsistent formulas too. You can use data validation for selectors, you can lock cells. You van use pivot tables for summaries.. named cells, perhaps tables (type of data collection).

You can also build your sheets properly, so formulas are secured from changes, or "draggable" - so even if someome breaks them you correct them.

The people who answer to you dont know much about Excel. What makes me wonder how much they know about programming.

Excel is a program that "gives power to the people" so there are tons of crappy sheets, that often mix data with calculations and so on. But you can make good sheets if you try. And know how to.

Other comments are amateur hour.

There are lots of bad programs too, but programming is not so democratic.

Also it is very convenient to blame a mistake on Excel.

>The people who answer to you dont know much about Excel. What makes me wonder how much they know about programming.

I'm one of the other commenters you called "amateur hour". I know about all of those things you mentioned.

>array formulas, using formula inspector, Excel marks inconsistent formulas too. You can use data validation for selectors, you can lock cells. You van use pivot tables for summaries.. named cells, perhaps tables (type of data collection).

Problem with all of these is some combination of:

- they suck

- boomers don't know how to use them

- you can't use them for compatibility reasons

Array formulae: boomers don't know how to use them, and the good ones aren't backwards compatible with older Excel versions or LibreOffice/Sheets (major problem when dealing with ppl outside the org)

Formula inspector: I've never found this to be useful

Excel marks inconsistent formulae ... inconsistently. It fights you when you're trying to do something slightly non-standard but otherwise perfectly legit, because it's just pattern-matching. Sometimes you have formulae that are fine, then you close and re-open the file and they're marked as inconsistent. Or vice versa. It leads to alarm fatigue. And boomers don't know what it means.

Data validation for selectors: boomers don't do this (are you seeing a pattern?). More importantly, they don't interact properly with macros. And it's difficult to express mutually-constrained inputs.

Pivot tables for summaries: boomers actually do know these, but the problem is they're not reactive. They don't refresh when the data source changes.

Locking cells: there's no convenient way to tell at a glance which cells are locked and which aren't (yes I know about the "Find All" way, that's not convenient).

Named cells: inconvenient, no namespacing (well there is a kind of namespacing but it's implicit), you can have duplicates of the same name that refer to different things, or dead ones that point to nothing, and there's no good way to debug it.

Tables: these are great, but sadly aren't compatible with LibreOffice/Sheets. Column labels cannot be dynamic. You can't put the summary row at the top, only the bottom. They will fill down a formula even when you don't want them to, there isn't a way to turn that off afaik. They don't interact properly with array spill formulae.

>You can also build your sheets properly, so formulas are secured from changes, or "draggable" - so even if someome breaks them you correct them.

People can and will fuck up even the best-made sheets in irrecoverable ways, that are difficult/impossible to detect automatically within Excel. Yes, we locked all the cells except for inputs, password-protected the sheets, used data validation, used tables, used named references, we did all that stuff you're meant to do and more. It wasn't enough: we'd get back the filled-in sheets and there would be broken references every-fucking-where. I've forgotten exactly what they were doing (it might have been from dragging cells around), but whatever it was, I had to write Python scripts to diagnose it by looping through all the cells and comparing the formulae and sheet layout against a known good copy.

Your first argument is that "boomers dont know / want to use excel properly". What is not really an argument.

Also it is common knowledge that MS tries to get rid of open spreadsheets - only allowed competition are google sheets. If your Excel doesnt have array formulas - please get a newer version. Even 2003 had them.

I dont claim that Excel doesnt have problems, also it could be better - but there are ways to make more robust calculations.

On a side note Excel and the dreaded (obsolete?) VBA are one of the last democratic things that allow non-programmers to build things.

Personally I hate tables, you can in fact add some random crap in one of the random cells.

Lots of your criticism are valid, Excel could definitely be better. But now we dont have better.

As someone trying to learn SQL, the syntax of typical queries(one page long, not some basic ones) is horrible - the language is completely not designed for tasks when you glue 20 tables together... are those queries easy to understand / inspect? IMHO no.

>Your first argument is that "boomers dont know / want to use excel properly". What is not really an argument.

it's the other side of the coin for "last democratic thing that allows non-programmers to build things" (which I sympathize with). you can't just ignore the capabilities of the userbase demographics.

>Also it is common knowledge that MS tries to get rid of open spreadsheets - only allowed competition are google sheets.

it's not microsoft's fault LibreOffice doesn't have tables. OnlyOffice has them. there's a feature request thread in the LibreOffice archives, someone asked for excel-style tables to be implemented. the LO devs didn't even know what they were(!), people had to explain it to them. dev response was lukewarm. there doesn't seem to be any great push to implement it.

https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/show_bug.cgi?id=132780

>If your Excel doesnt have array formulas - please get a newer version. Even 2003 had them.

I mean the new ones. the dynamic array formulae with the spill behaviour. SEQUENCE, FILTER, SORT, UNIQUE, etc. those are only in office 365.

>As someone trying to learn SQL, the syntax of typical queries(one page long, not some basic ones) is horrible - the language is completely not designed for tasks when you glue 20 tables together... are those queries easy to understand / inspect? IMHO no.

no disagreement there, SQL is not a good language. have you tried M?

Well you can. You can ask "boomers" to build stuff in a real programming language. Which they wont.

Also you act as if there werent any programming horror stories. Very often programmers want to rewrite the code they got from othera.

I am not sure which one is M and which one is DAX. Those are the PowerBI ones. In my opinion they are horrible. The idea of "steps" makes sense, but the gui that breaks steps is horrible. Also the syntax is horrible.

MS at some point had pivot tables, pivot tables with data model, power pivot, powerBI stand-alone app, "old" sql query editor. Now they try to add powerBI standalone back to Excel.. partially (on a side note I hate that poweBI exports from stand alone app to Excel are so horrible), and they got rid of the old SQL editor. If you want to write SQL in Excel you might as well use notepad..

PowerBI was supposed to be a step forward. OK it allows to build things, but is in my opinion horrible. M/DAX are horrible to use for typical operarions such as;

Changing source

Combining two sources

Joins

Joins on joins on joins

Joins

Syntax is supposed to be explicit, but it is horrible to write and horrible to read

I have seen people in the insurance business using Word as their calculation tool.

If these tools need any type of user interaction they won't use it.

How many people still right align text per spacebar or tab if they are pros?

I'm not sure it would be that easy to sell. The overwhelming majority of Excel users don't realize that they need tests.

Have two different people do the same work, see if they get the same answer. Ideally the two people use different tools, so "likely to make same mistake" is minimized.

“A man with one watch always knows what time it is. A man with two watches is never sure.”

That's why you need three watches.

Oh man. My mother's house has so many clocks with a variety of opinions on what the time is. I have to average them to get an estimate of what the real time is.

Every man now has access to a swarm of atomic clocks in Earth orbit and the necessary relativistic corrections to know time anywhere on earth, down to a few nanoseconds.

Tell that to my microwave, my oven, the clock in my car, my watch, the clock on the wall…

I agree with the general thrust of your point, but I should point out that there are non-technological ways to error-proof. E.g., this pre-computer approach: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double-entry_bookkeeping

Is it really not possible to write unit tests for a spreadsheet with Office Script?

> and have a formula accidentally replaced by a static number on line 87456

Surely this specific case could be validated externally with a script too.

Yes, it's possible to do a VBA macro or an external program to validate a sheet.

But there is no built-in tool you can use to say to excel "this column must always be a number, don't ever allow it to be autodetected as a date" or "this column must always have a formula, if the formula doesn't exist or is a static number, alert the user".

You can lock cells, but who bothers doing that in the real world.

If one has to write a program to check if a user did not screw up cut and paste from one sheet/column/whatever it would be IMHO easier to just skip Excel, user and just write a script automating error prone C&P in Excel.

If some user wants to view it, then the script can create a valid Excel file.

Well it depends on your data. I'm an accountant and it is very normal for accountants spreadsheets to be full of 'check digits'. Checks and balances are well ingrained into accounts!

In its basic form you perform the same calculation on the totals as you did on the roots and subtract it from the result. The answer must be zero. I know it is harder on some kinds of data, but it can prevent a huge amount of every day errors.

Makes perfect sense. The testing being discussed is to create platform where generic tests can be coded and rerun. So tests that aren't specific to totals and subtotals

I've had columns filled with a formula and intentionally replaced one cell with a static value. You immediately get a warning on that cell that can be ignored/cleared but takes a handful of clicks to do so. Granted, there's no overall place to view the warnings (that I am aware of) so if you have 100k lines and one cell replaced you can't easily see it without inspecting everything. Is this no longer the case?

I just made an Excel sheet, put in formulas and I could just type over any formula with numbers without any notifications or errors.

How do you manage to require "a handful of clicks" to do it?

This only happens in "proper" tables. When you add a formula to a table column, Excel will automatically convert it into a "calculated column," so overridden values will have a green mark denoting an "inconsistent formula."

It's still a pretty minor warning and it only requires two clicks to ignore.

There are certainly a lot of good practices such as ensuring any formulas are compatible with "fill down". It'd make for a nice standard, like MISRA C.

If you wanted automatic formula auditing, I'd recommend using R1C1 reference style so formulas using relative references are independent of the cell's location, then use FORMULATEXT function, and an array formula applied over the whole range you want to check.

Then you could be sure.

> If you wanted automatic formula auditing, I'd recommend using R1C1 reference style so formulas

That's indeed one of the basic suggestions in Spolsky's "You Suck At Excel":

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0nbkaYsR94c

Does Excel have version control and diffing? I know Word does.

A diff tool called "Spreadsheet Compare" is included with Excel. I don't think its supports "Track Changes" like Word.

It supports track changes if you save the file as a "shared workbook". That has a limited feature set, though.

Not in any manner that is useful

When stored on SharePoint, yes to version control.

But it's not useful. Version control on WYSIWYG is definitely not a solved problem.

Excel marks inconsistent formulas, there is also a formula checker.

That's why you use SQL and not Excel to analyse the data.

Will you be the one to teach boomer-age payroll accountants to create SQL tables for their calculations? I can give you a phone number to offer your consulting services :)

Of course a custom website backed by a properly schema'd SQL database would be better, but that takes money, time and someone needs to keep it updated.

People use Excel because it's on everyone's computer by default, they have full permissions to do anything with it without needing IT approval and it's surprisingly powerful when you get into it.

And if a client happens to have a really weird non-standard requirement for how their payroll is done, any accountant can easily create a custom Excel sheet just for them - instead of waiting 6 months for an external consultant company to provide them with a custom tool that does 80% what they need.

I understand why people still use Excel, but then, it's to be expected that there will be errors. And that's fine, some errors can be tolerated if the saving for using cheap tools with a cheap workforce is big enough.

But if you want reliability, just don't use Excel because making it bulletproof is pricier than just using SQL for reporting and analysis.

Power query solves these issues

These aren’t “technical errors”. These are user errors, made by people who know just enough about Excel to use it, but not to include anything that validates the results - or constraints that prevent intentional or unintentional manipulation of sheets, once considered “done”.

Unfortunately, this is not a problem with the tool, Excel does what it’s supposed to. Any tool in the hands of someone not properly trained to use it, or without the discipline to use it correctly, adds a risk of incorrect output.

I would say that the Citibank loan payment fiasco was mostly due to bad software design - which yes is mostly due to bad management priorities and validation. I don’t think most people look at that and say “that was pure user error, the software is fine”

On the other side of the spectrum there’s pure user error aka pebkac.

Where does this instance sit on the spectrum, I.e. even although it is possible to do a lot of things in excel, it’s often not a good idea to do many of things in it for a variety of deficiencies.

The problem is fundamental to the spreadsheet data model. Spreadsheets use the "big bag of cells" data model, where anything can go anywhere. The people who enjoy spreadsheets like this data model, it is very quick to get something up and running. Those of us who don't like spreadsheets hate it. it encourages the mixing of data and code. it promotes coding via copy/paste and all the opportunities for code/data addressing mismatches that go with it. But for me the thing that drives spreadsheets from mildly annoying to outright dislike is that there is very little done to keep data rows intact, it is very easy for items in a row of data to end up where they shouldn't be. All I really want is row security... So I ended up replacing my spreadsheets with relational databases. the UI sucks in comparison. but at least my rows stay intact.

Even with plain text CSV files one can detect that a given cell was changed, have md5 checksums of files, etc. In a day to day use where users often share their edits using emails just figuring out which is the correct and most recent copy is a fools errand.

In some settings the sheets are just a giant white boards: different parts of the same sheet can contain partially replicated and not cross-checked data. Samples in columns, so each row is a different type. "Free flow of thought" or annotations of say numerical cell with text in the same cell.

All this steams from the fact that users do not see the data as something to be queried and compared but as a board one can just look at.

Exactly the same line of argumentation people bring forward in defense of C. If only it was used correctly, it would work! But it isn’t and it won’t, and modern alternatives are popular for a reason. It’s a technology problem.

It is a problem with the tool. The footguns outnumber useful functionality ten to one.

Austrian politicians on all levels rarely admit their mistakes, the same yesterday where the blame was put on technical errors and the lack of a second count (preferably on paper, it's only 600 votes after all) was barely mentioned. Procedures were sloppy and hastened, hence the error wasn't spotted on Saturday.

This isn't the first time spreadsheet errors have messed with election results.

It was a column error in tabulated election results that cause all the conflict in 2020 in Antrim county, Michigan. Any computer folks who took the time to read the report by an University of Michigan computer scientist hired by the Republican chaired bipartisan committee that the Michigan state senate would have seen that there was no vote fraud, but user error that got caught almost immediately in the accountability systems that were in place to catch any errors like that.

If we stopped trying to report election returns in real time like sporting events, and could be patient a few hours, we could avoid a lot of these highly divisive controversies.

> If we stopped trying to report election returns in real time ... we could avoid a lot of these highly divisive controversies.

At least in the United States, election results were reported the same night for decades and there were very few questions surrounding the truth, even in 2000 people agreed on the need for a recount, even if they disagreed on the methodology or the ultimate result.

Only since 2020, all of a sudden results take multiple days and the electorate is supposed to just understand "this is how it is now" and not question anything, despite witnessing major swings in individual states or districts occurring overnight.

> Only since 2020, all of a sudden results take multiple days and the electorate is supposed to just understand "this is how it is now" and not question anything, despite witnessing major swings in individual states or districts occurring overnight.

The main reason the counting took much longer was three-fold: many more votes were cast by mail than was typical, several states were quite close in their vote count (three states within 1%), and a few states were prohibited from taking any preparatory steps to counting mail ballots prior to election day. And this was known--and heavily reported on!--well before the election.

Counting mail-in ballots is intrinsically harder than in-person ballots. Indeed, very rarely is it ever actually completed on election night (not least of which is that in many states, the votes need not be received by election day to be counted). However, usually mail-in ballots aren't enough to decide the results of an election. But when 2/3 of the ballots are via mail, and especially when there was an expected partisan difference between in-person and mail-in ballots, it takes a lot longer to develop a good consensus as to when one of the candidates is highly likely to have won.

> Only since 2020

Good grief. That's just simply not correct. What happened is that in 2016 and 2020 specifically, the presidential election turned on a handful of states that were (by definition, really) very close. Close results take longer, because if it's not close you can call an election without finishing the count. If the close states are not critical to the result, as is more common, no one cares.

> major swings in individual states or districts occurring overnight

Again, no. This is not a new effect, nor is the fact that different groups of ballots skew differently and are counted at different times.

2016 was called on election night.

I know it was rediculous! Biden was leading Texas and then all of the sudden we're supposed to expect a surge of red votes and now Trump carried the state?

But in all seriousness.

1) "Decades" is 5 elections which is a sample size of garbage.

2) The election results haven't been actually reported on the same day for a long time. Absentee ballots aren't countable until after Election day in many states making it trivial to demonstrate that they haven't been counted until the next day meaning you can't have reported the exact results on the first night.

Now, news media have been making predictions on who is going to win the election and they did refrain from doing that. But one big thing to remember is that states where Republicans determined the election process such as Arizona did not even count 100% of their ballots by Nov 12 (9 days after the 3rd, aka Election Day).

I agree things have become far more contentious since 2020. Trump's campaign used that controversy to fund-raise for "legal defense" but the small print in his campaign emails I received also said the funds could be used to pay down his campaign debts.

If you haven't read the Michigan Senate report (result of an 8-month bipartisan investigation chaired by a Trump Republican), please do. It cleared the air and answered tons of questions for me, seeing the evidence they found and realizing that there are simple, understandable reasons explaining what happened and also explaining the ruckus that resulted from so many people crying fraud but being unwilling to take time themselves to investigate the facts of the matter.

I'm not claiming fraud. But when the way an election is administered is radically different than all prior instances, that leads to seeds of distrust, and I think it is perfectly foreseeable that many people would jump to the conclusion that some fraud is involved. By your own admission, you needed an 8-month long investigation to quell your own concerns.

> But when the way an election is administered is radically different than all prior instances

Again, that is simply not the case. At all. State governments[1] run several elections every year, and they use the same processes and laws for all of them. Surely you've voted many times since 2020, right? And probably before, right? And... you didn't notice that it's the same process?

[1] This was not, and has never been, "an election" that is "administered" in a central way. Every state has its own laws. Every state runs its own election. The only federal "election" involved is the ceremonial one involving the meeting of the state electors.

Plenty of states changed their laws and procedures in 2020 in response to Covid restrictions. Early and mail-in voting were significantly expanded. To say "it's the same process" is not accurate, when comparing 2020 to prior years.

> This was not, and has never been, "an election" that is "administered" in a central way

The lack of central administration is the primary source of skepticism. States and regions each determined their new rules independently without formal oversight or approval. A single nationally-run election would have ensured everyone followed the same rules, even if those rules weren't perfect or to everybody's liking. Without that, all kinds of rumors and stories and misunderstandings were reported in the media, regarding different local rules around mail-in ballots, signature verification, drop-off boxes, counting procedures, polling hours, etc. Even if jurisdictions followed their own rules perfectly, it led to questions about why those rules were set that way in the first place. People in California thinking Florida is rigging things, while other people in Texas assuming Michigan is corrupt, etc etc all over the country, mostly based on unsubstantiated rumors and media reports, but influential nonetheless.

The difference, I'd argue, is that generally the loser of an election makes a public statement conceding that they lost. 2000 definitely was an outlier in this regard as well, but I think it still differed in that the disagreement was about counting the votes, not about the integrity of the election itself. Once you have a major candidate who's willing to make a baseless claim of fraud and a "stolen" election, suddenly the process that used to happen behind the scenes quietly in the past to count and verify the result that was announced earlier is put under a microscope and analyzed by people who have no idea how that process actually works, which is...well, almost everyone.

> I think it still differed in that the disagreement was about counting the votes, not about the integrity of the election itself.

How could one question the vote-count without questioning the integrety of the election?

I might have been imprecise; in 2000, the claim was that the tallying of votes led to an incorrect result, whereas in 2020 the claim was that a massive number of illegal votes were cast and therefore caused the result to be different than it otherwise would have been. The former could easily be attributable to something like a spreadsheet error (like in TFA), whereas the latter would require malicious intent to commit election fraud. It doesn't seem surprising to me that alleging criminal intent to submit huge numbers of fraudulent ballots in what would have had to be several states would cause a larger public response and interest in the details of how votes are counted than arguing that a single state (Florida) should have to count the ballots again to verify the final total.

Forgot to link the Michigan Senate report: https://misenategopcdn.s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/99/doccume...

Mind that in this case the vote was not a large nation wide vote like a U.S. primary, but an election at a party delegate convention. Thus 400 or so voters. That should be doable in acceptable time.

My wife is a school administrator and every year I run a little self-written pipeline for her to munge the local authority's XML admissions data into an Xlsx that the staff can use for planning home visits, class allocation etc. Excel (well strictly speaking it's loaded into Google sheets) really is the only game in town for this kind of thing, but even at this very low level there are many fraught footguns necessitating extremely careful handling. Anyone running an election or an economy off this thing needs their head examined.

The R community is fantastic and very helpful for getting started. There is so much peace of mind to be gained by doing everything in R and then using R’s write.xlsx to output the excel sheet for your users.

Python+pandas is an ok alternative. The ergonomics are weird, but if you’re familiar with Python, it works enough.

There's actually an annual conference dedicated to Spreadsheet risks, they have lots of Excel horror stories on their website: https://eusprig.org/research-info/horror-stories/

The tragedy about it is, that they only had to count 600 votes and had a committee of 20 people for doing that. All 20 people could’ve just counted all the votes, without any „technology“ involved.

All the experts said, that usually in such an election the ballots are sorted by candidate, put on stacks of 10s, then combined to stacks of 100s. If they followed this best practice, they would’ve had around 10 stacks, and the result would‘ve been obvious to everyone.

(Not so) funny twist: after the election the ballots were put into unsealed bags and were stored in an office where many people had access. So all recounts that are done now, are completely worthless.

And the winner is "January 3rd 2023"

The first person to change their legal name to #NAME? wins.

This reminds me of the Excel scoring error by NASA that impacted where the Space Shuttles would be retired. Basically costing the National Museum of the U.S. Air Force an orbiter (though the NASA Administrator says it wouldn't have made a difference in the end). It was a bad enough screwup that Congress complained and NASA's OIG filed a report on the incident. It's a pretty interesting read: https://oig.nasa.gov/docs/Review_NASAs_Selection_Display_Loc...

I cannot overstress just how much attention one has to pay to verification of any results produced using Excel. Don't get me wrong, I think it is a fantastic tool and have been using it for decades. However, I have the scars to prove just how badly it can hurt you.

One of the best (worst?) cases was a bug that caused a custom high speed board based on Xilinx FPGA's to have intermittent failures that were very difficult to track down.

It was six months of almost 12 hours a day fully engulfed in debugging this FPGA code. I must have re-written it from the bottom up three times during this period. You get to the point where you start to doubt spaces within statements...even when you know damn well they are irrelevant.

And then, one day, at two in the morning, while looking at the code that generated coefficients for a set of polyphase FIR filers, and a micro-coded state machine that drove that module, I saw the problem.

I made a mistake in the calculations and used ROUND() instead of ROUNDUP(). This caused all kinds of crazy issues, like FIFO's being short by one element and jumps occurring at the wrong time. It was truly maddening.

The Verilog code this spreadsheet generated was copied and pasted right into a couple of Verilog modules and compiled into the chip without even looking at it. It worked very well, it just didn't do what we wanted it to do.

We still use Excel a lot to help generate code. However, lessons learned over the years made us far less trusting, which is good.

Excel and ChatGPT have lot in common, great tools but easy to be used wrong or the wrong purpose. Especially because it seems so easy to get results.

Well, this does not come as a surprise at all. The digital age totally passed these people without notice. As did many other things. Sad to watch, but this party is killing itself. This is what happens when you no longer can pretend, and would actually need to act, but then it turns out all your minions are pretty incapable of acting properly, so, this is what results...

apparently the total vote count was 600 and something. definitely need excel to count that out sigh

Wrong. The count of the unaccounted votes was 600. Around 100k people voted in this "election".

No this is not true. There was an election among party members, that was with around 147000 people. This election apparently worked. It was the subsequent election among the party functionaries (601 people) that failed due to someone not being able to do 4th grade math.

I think Microsoft should improve Excel in several ways. Especially, there should be version control and a possibility to review code. Sometimes I see super complex Excel calculations. The code is barely readable because it’s in this tiny text area. These people are real programmers. But they are constrained by a tool.

That would also be the alternative if Microsoft doesn’t improve this. Switch over to version controlled and reviewed code in R, Python, …

In any Excel sheet everything is mixed up: you got raw data, calculated values, formulas, formatting, plots etc.

With a Jupyter notebook you have these well separated, and there is a little chance that someone somehow changed the font in one of the 20k cells with values. Scaling up plots or changing the color scheme are explicit: you must have a cell changing the defaults. Yu can not just muse over some cell, press Del and plonk it. If you verified say md5 checksum for the raw data file it contains what you expect it to contain.

If you follow up actions of an average Excel user, then it is a long chain of mostly purely manual manipulations, like selecting the cells, copy and paste, add color here and there etc. A lot of steps to check and verify. Compared to SQL or data frame manipulations it is too complicated to be really useful IMHO

That's quite embarrassing. I personally am happy that my favored candidate has won in the end.

People need to stop using this horrible tool. I have watched people doing things in Excel in seconds for stuff that would take me multiple minutes. Main difference is me checking if results after each transformation are plausible. I wonder how often such "Excel-Errors" led to wrong decisions.

This is not an Excel error. It's user error. Don't blame software like it's some force of nature that you can't control.

I love Excel, it's amazing.

It should be illegal to use it for any critical issue.

We "lost" 1000s of covid cases back in the pandemic here in the UK because the version of excel they were using only had 65k rows.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-54423988

Ok, that's embarrassing, but good on the for still having real votes, I guess?

Here in Germany it's far too common for political parties to decide such things ahead of elections behind closed doors, and then the election is only there to show the party's support for the new leader.

Which annoys me to no end, because it defeats the whole purpose of the democratic process.

This is not an Excel error. It's user error. Don't blame software like it's some force of nature that you can't control. Confusing names is not something Excel can prevent.

I would guess that the average in use Excel spreadsheet has fewer errors than the equivalent custom written app.

I would also guess that it is far more understandable to far more people than the equivalent custom written app.

It is also likely far easier to modify for far more people than the average custom written app.

With regards to unit testing, do you test your unit tests? My guess is that the average excel spreadsheet has fewer errors than the average unit test.

Your guesses seem suspect to me. I'll take a small Python script with a loop over a spreadsheet any day.

Especially when you consider stuff like "Oh I want all the rows, but only know how to type in exact cell references. Ehh, 100 rows should do", and someone misses that their totals for a 10 year period are only including the first 8 and a bit years.

Somewhere in the universe there is an accounting of the net effect of Excel errors on the planet.

It's probably horrifying.

They can say whatever they want, lie about whatever they want and they can prove whatever they want.

they counted the ballots of every box separately and used excel to add the numbers together, that's not an excel error (it were about 600 ballots altogether, so pencil and paper would have sufficed)

> wrong candidate

"Too early to tell."

If they made all source material available and a law that makes discrimination against who you voted for hate speech

Much of it is public record. And if you don't have time to wade through the data, the court cases Trump's campaign litigated provide a wealth of one the record, sworn testimony and evidence.[1]

I was amazed to read, for example, in Pennsylvania that when Rudy Giuliani was sworn under oath he told the judge that they were not alleging fraud had occurred in the election, yet in the media and in public he was loudly crying "Fraud!"

Follow the facts.

[1] You can find the case names to know what to search for here: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-election_lawsuits_relat...

Wonderful

I can’t believe the election disinformation being posted here. That was the fairest election in history. We shouldn’t be spreading conspiracy theories about election software or operator errors.

I learned all this I 2020.

If they cannot convingly explain this mishap, they need to recount the election counts. Austria is not 3rd world dictatorship as Turkey or the USA with such ridiculities.

They did a recount. In fact, that’s how they figured out there has been a mistake. Otherwise, nobody would have found out. It’s only ca 600 votes btw, so very easy to recount.

> It’s only ca 600 votes btw

Yet, in the run up to this (party leadership) election, it was far from clear exactly who the ca 600 voters actually were. None of the candidates apparently knew!

The winner is Andreas Babler who is firmly on the left wing of his party.

On 24th May he gave two TV interviews. In the first interview, prerecorded and broadbast on the Puls24 channel, he said "I'm a Marxist".

In the second (live) interview on another channel later that day he was asked about his statement from earlier on, he answered "I really don't understand the excitement".

The interviewer (Armin Wolf) then challenged him about what Marxism means and whether Marxism is something that a majority of Austrian voters could support. At this point Babler backed off.

Interviewer: "So you're not a Marxist after all?" Babler: "No, not at all. If you interpret it that way."

I really don't understand the excitement either

> I really don't understand the excitement either

In the latter interview, Wolf challenged Babler, pointing out that Marxism is associated with both "expropriation" and "the dictatorship of the proletariat".

To many people, those are pretty wild ideas, although apparently much less so for SPÖ members?

Guess time will tell what the Austrian voters at large actually think, their national elections aren't due until Autumn 2024...

Babler probably (poorly) tried to communicate that he subscribes to Austro-Marxism, which replaces revolution with congressional democratic majority. That‘s what SPÖ has always been based on, and I‘d say, it worked out well till the 70s.

Gregor Gysi is a marxist and I don't know that he scared voters

According to bundestag.de, here's how Die Linke/PDS did in the last few decades' elections in Germany:

  Year Die Linke/PDS
  2021 4.9%
  2017 9.2%
  2013 8.6%
  2009 11.9%
  2005 8.7%
  2002 4.0%
  1998 5.1%
  1994 4.4%
  1990 2.4%

I'm not sure what to make of that other than that this party has a fairly limited appeal, and has lost a lot of ground since 2009.

Marxists (the KPOe) recently won two major city council elections, first in Graz, then in Salzburg.

So it's quite fashionable to call oneself marxist nowadays in Austria, even if he was from the centre-left SPOe, not the true KPOe.

> Marxists (the KPOe) recently won two major city council elections, first in Graz, then in Salzburg

In the regional (state) elections in Salzburg in April 2023 the results look quite different:

  ÖVP (centre right)  30.4% 
  FPÖ (further right) 25.7%
  SPÖ (centre left)   17.9%
  KPÖ (further left)  11.7%
  Greens               8.2%
  Neos                 4.2%

and so they got a "centre-right plus further-right" coalition government.

Yes, the KPö only has a chance in city council elections. Nobody would trust them regional or even country.

The party Die Linke has a complicated history. Its biggest success came on the tail end of the merger with the WASG, which was a left-wing party that split off the SPD following many members' disappointment with the SPD/Green coalition government under Schroeder. A lot of its strongholds are owed more to the candidates themselves than the party, which has provided a certain stability while also giving those candidates a disproportionate level of influence in an otherwise supposedly democratic platform (more democratic than other parties, at least).

The party Die Linke also does not explicitly tie itself to a single leftist ideology. You'll find anarchists, Marxists-Leninists and Trotskyists, both radical social progressives campaigning for ongoing civil rights issues and social conservatives worrying about alienating reactionaries. This creates a lot of potential for "democratic discourse" or "in-fighting" (depending on which bias you prefer). It has also allowed the party to receive "protest votes", although those are now more associated with the far-right (and regionally right-wing extremist) AfD.

Turkey had a runoff election after a close result and a third party splitting the vote.

Imagine if that happened in 92 back in the states.

If by dictatorship you mean the military coups from its history -- that is an interesting and unique-in-the-world situation where Atatürk granted power to the military to overthrow the government if they strayed too far from his Kemalist ideal of the republic, probably the only coups in human history which the end goal was to force the people to have another election (with the not so subtle threat to not make them have to come back again -- this is the origin of the term "deep state" which became popularized in the US recently)

Now there is evidence that the US had a hand in some of the original (pre-2016) coups.

I would be wary to oversimplify Turkish politics.

Fun fact: the US is a 1st world country by definition because the terms "1st world", "2nd world" and "3rd world" originate in the Cold War with "1st world" being US-aligned countries, "2nd world" Soviet-aligned countries and "3rd world" being "unaligned" countries, typically because they were too unimportant/weak/poor in the world economy to be relevant. The term "3rd world" stuck around to simply mean "underdeveloped".

That said, as far as I followed the story, the (actual) winning candidate insisted on a thorough investigation and full recount. The (actual) losing candidate immediately accepted his defeat and did not object to the new outcome. As transfers of power go, this one was fairly smooth.

> Austria is not 3rd world dictatorship as Turkey or the USA with such ridiculities.

we will see.

In the US 2020 elections, there are plenty of convincing explanations of the mishaps[1], yet Trump's base couldn't be bothered to take time to read the explanations. I say that based on my conversations with friends who still belive the election was stolen, but when I ask them if they'd read any of the detailed legislative investigations or court proceedings (rather than simply listening to their media echo chambers), they always end the conversation saying no, they haven't.

[1] https://misenategopcdn.s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/99/doccume...

Republican Trump-supporting committee chair McBroom summarized the above report, saying,

“Our clear finding is that citizens should be confident the results represent the true results of the ballots cast by the people of Michigan.... There is no evidence presented at this time to prove either significant acts of fraud or that an organized, wide-scale effort to commit fraudulent activity was perpetrated in order to subvert the will of Michigan voters.”

McBroom added: “The Committee strongly recommends citizens use a critical eye and ear toward those who have pushed demonstrably false theories for their own personal gain.”

Reply on news.ycombinator.com