Oh no, the wrong guy won! Quick, make up a bureaucratic error!
This is one of the most bizarre things I’ve seen in domestic politics, but is somehow just fitting for the state of the shit show that calls itself SPÖ. What happened is basically this:
1. SPÖ, the main center-left opposition party, had a party leadership election and the candidate favored to win won it on Saturday
2. They published the results, and a [journalist on Twitter](https://twitter.com/MartinThuer/status/1664992876231639042) saw that they had 596 valid votes, but the tally of the votes by candidate only added up to 395
3. Today, the SPÖ called for a press conference. Apparently, they mixed up the results of both candidates in Excel and it was actually the underdog candidate that won the election
So if this journalist doesn’t sum up the numbers by chance, there is no recount and the candidate with the lower amount of votes would have won the election.
As far as I read, the missing vote in the tally (that caused the recount) was an invalid one btw.
After I first heard about that, I thought it was satire. Turns out, it wasn’t
Just so everyone understands how insane this is:
* They did the initial count, missed one invalid vote so a journalist noticed their numbers did not add up, but it did not matter, the result was clear – so no recount on the weekend and this was not even related to the actual mistake.
* The party’s internal voting commission pledged to look into the problem on Monday, they did and found an invalid vote had been counted as valid, the result was the same. But as they confirmed the numbers they noticed it was the exact reverse result of what they had published on the weekend. They had just literally flipped the names in excel!
Absolutely crazy this happened on such a high level of politics and nobody would have noticed unless they did this random, unrelated recount.
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🤣🫢
Oh no, the wrong guy won! Quick, make up a bureaucratic error!
This is one of the most bizarre things I’ve seen in domestic politics, but is somehow just fitting for the state of the shit show that calls itself SPÖ. What happened is basically this:
1. SPÖ, the main center-left opposition party, had a party leadership election and the candidate favored to win won it on Saturday
2. They published the results, and a [journalist on Twitter](https://twitter.com/MartinThuer/status/1664992876231639042) saw that they had 596 valid votes, but the tally of the votes by candidate only added up to 395
3. Today, the SPÖ called for a press conference. Apparently, they mixed up the results of both candidates in Excel and it was actually the underdog candidate that won the election
So if this journalist doesn’t sum up the numbers by chance, there is no recount and the candidate with the lower amount of votes would have won the election.
As far as I read, the missing vote in the tally (that caused the recount) was an invalid one btw.
After I first heard about that, I thought it was satire. Turns out, it wasn’t
Just so everyone understands how insane this is:
* They did the initial count, missed one invalid vote so a journalist noticed their numbers did not add up, but it did not matter, the result was clear – so no recount on the weekend and this was not even related to the actual mistake.
* The party’s internal voting commission pledged to look into the problem on Monday, they did and found an invalid vote had been counted as valid, the result was the same. But as they confirmed the numbers they noticed it was the exact reverse result of what they had published on the weekend. They had just literally flipped the names in excel!
Absolutely crazy this happened on such a high level of politics and nobody would have noticed unless they did this random, unrelated recount.