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That's a very good point, and of course you flag your test data with a special "TEST" flag.

Now remember the lack of sleep for a week before the election, and imagine a possible bug where your client code somehow fails to put up that big TEST DATA message that you thought was there.

It happens. Happened to me. :-)

I'm with you on taking the more cynical view on this, but there are plausible explanations. Perhaps they based their testing on 2008 data and just people wouldn't understand the testing process so didn't include that part in the explanation.

Perhaps they used the raw 2008 data as the base, but with 2008 candidates mapped to 2013 candidates for testing purposes.