Suspicious data pattern in recent Venezuelan election • Hacker News Board

Re: Suspicious data pattern in recent Venezuelan election

#21

Post by tumult » Wed, Jul 31, 2024, 9:28 PM UTC

jvanderbot wrote: post #10

koube wrote: post #4

Forgive me if this is a dumb question, but isn't every vote total extremely unlikely if you make it precise to the exact number of votes? Like the chances of getting n+1, n+2... votes is roughly the same probability. For example the probability of getting [1,2,3,4,5,6] as the winning numbers in the lottery is the same as any random set of numbers.

The question was "How likely is it that the votes worked out so well that they were basically even 1/10 percentages and not ugly numbers?" So for a given number of votes, which determines a split, how many times does the split come out so nice? Answer: Effectively none - there are always ugly numbers with lots of decimal places. Now that analysis comes after they conjecture that the percentages were fixed apriori. Th…

Another way of writing it out:

How likely is it that you'd get these votes distributions

    51.2000000%
    44.2000000%
    04.6000000%

exactly? With all of those clean 0s? Very low.

But it's also possible that there was sloppy reporting and the vote counts were re-processed at some point in the chain and rounded to one decimal place.

Re: Suspicious data pattern in recent Venezuelan election

#22

Post by dinobones » Wed, Jul 31, 2024, 9:29 PM UTC

Here's this re-explained with a simpler example.

Imagine you have 1,000 votes. You want to show that your political party got 60% of the vote, so, you claim:

My party: 600 votes Opposition: 300 votes Other: 100 votes

Presto, we got a good breakdown. The people will buy it....

It makes sense that 600 is exactly 60% of 1,000, because this was an artificial example.

But in the real world, we don't get 1,000 votes.

We get 10,058,774 votes. What are the odds that the % of votes you get is a round number like 60%, or 51.2%? They're infinitesimally small. You're much more likely to get ugly numbers, like 59.941323854% of the vote, unless you choose some artificial percentage and work backward.

Re: Suspicious data pattern in recent Venezuelan election

#23

Post by pydry » Wed, Jul 31, 2024, 9:29 PM UTC

sanex wrote: post #12

glass1122 wrote: post #7

[flagged]

It's even more surprising that you can't argue with chavistas since there aren't any.

There are plenty in Venezuela, all speaking Spanish to each other.

You would never ever run into one online on a predominantly English speaking website or in America/Europe in person, but you might encounter one of the upper classes.

I used to work with one of them. She complained that Chavez stole her family's second home. I presumed her family, like America, also supported the attempted military coup shortly after he was elected in 2002.

Re: Suspicious data pattern in recent Venezuelan election

#24

Post by tumult » Wed, Jul 31, 2024, 9:29 PM UTC

shadowgovt wrote: post #14

tumult wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s not what this article is about. Read the article.

FWIW, statistics is hard. Having read the article, I came away with similar questions and I appreciate the sibling comments clarifying.

Fair enough. Sorry.

Re: Suspicious data pattern in recent Venezuelan election

#25

Post by stapled_socks » Wed, Jul 31, 2024, 9:30 PM UTC

To play the devil's advocate: It's possible that the person making the announcement was only given the rounded percentages and the total number of votes, and then "created" the number of votes per candidate to fit to the format of the announcement. That would be sloppy, but not malicious.

Re: Suspicious data pattern in recent Venezuelan election

#26

Post by neura » Wed, Jul 31, 2024, 9:31 PM UTC

koube wrote: post #4

Forgive me if this is a dumb question, but isn't every vote total extremely unlikely if you make it precise to the exact number of votes? Like the chances of getting n+1, n+2... votes is roughly the same probability. For example the probability of getting [1,2,3,4,5,6] as the winning numbers in the lottery is the same as any random set of numbers.

I think you are correct, but that's missing the point of the article's content. I'm just a programmer, not a math expert, but I believe these statements are accurate.

1. It's very easy to arrive at the provided values, if you make up some percentages that only go to a single decimal value (1/10th). Though doing so would result in vote counts that are decimal, as well. Then if you just remove the decimal from those values, the given percentages don't change enough to be incorrect, but even when taken to 7 decimal places, the new values are pretty clearly due to the rounding (44.2%: 44.1999989%, 4.6%: 4.6000039%).

2. While yes, the chance of these vote counts coming up in this kind of pattern is similar to the example you provided, even if you were using 0-9 for your example of 6 values, the total combinations is about an order of magnitude less than the total vote count provided here.

3. The finer point made is that there's a very small chance for one of the vote counts to show up as a number that so nicely fits the single decimal percentage, but in this case, all 3 vote counts fit this pattern. The calculations are shown for just 2 of the candidates (so not including the "other") resulting only a 1 in 100 million chance.

Re: Suspicious data pattern in recent Venezuelan election

#27

Post by SoftTalker » Wed, Jul 31, 2024, 9:33 PM UTC

koube wrote: post #4

Forgive me if this is a dumb question, but isn't every vote total extremely unlikely if you make it precise to the exact number of votes? Like the chances of getting n+1, n+2... votes is roughly the same probability. For example the probability of getting [1,2,3,4,5,6] as the winning numbers in the lottery is the same as any random set of numbers.

> For example the probability of getting [1,2,3,4,5,6] as the winning numbers in the lottery is the same as any random set of numbers.

Yes, but the comparison is not to "any random set of numbers" it's "all other random sets of numbers"

The candidate got 52.200000% of the vote instead of any other percentage, not another specific percentage.

Re: Suspicious data pattern in recent Venezuelan election

#28

Post by readthenotes1 » Wed, Jul 31, 2024, 9:34 PM UTC

energy123 wrote: post #20

paxys wrote: post #6

[flagged]

If it was just 2 candidates, it would be slightly more believable, a 1 in 10,000 chance instead of 1 in 100 million chance.

Well, that is Maduro, a 1 in 100 million leader. There are fewer than 28 million people in Venezuela so the rest of us better watch out!

Re: Suspicious data pattern in recent Venezuelan election

#29

Post by neura » Wed, Jul 31, 2024, 9:35 PM UTC

tumult wrote: post #21

jvanderbot wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The question was "How likely is it that the votes worked out so well that they were basically even 1/10 percentages and not ugly numbers?" So for a given number of votes, which determines a split, how many times does the split come out so nice? Answer: Effectively none - there are always ugly numbers with lots of decimal places. Now that analysis comes after they conjecture that the percentages were fixed apriori. Th…

Another way of writing it out: How likely is it that you'd get these votes distributions 51.2000000% 44.2000000% 04.6000000% exactly? With all of those clean 0s? Very low. But it's also possible that there was sloppy reporting and the vote counts were re-processed at some point in the chain and rounded to one decimal place.

It's more that if you start with those clean, single decimal percentages and a total number of votes, you'd end up with decimals for number of votes, which isn't possible. So if you then remove the decimal from the votes, you get slightly different percentage values when taken to 7 decimal places, but the original decimals would still be the same.

The chances of those numbers occurring normally for all 3 vote counts together is just ridiculously tiny.

Re: Suspicious data pattern in recent Venezuelan election

#30

Post by [deleted] » Wed, Jul 31, 2024, 9:35 PM UTC

tumult wrote: post #21

jvanderbot wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The question was "How likely is it that the votes worked out so well that they were basically even 1/10 percentages and not ugly numbers?" So for a given number of votes, which determines a split, how many times does the split come out so nice? Answer: Effectively none - there are always ugly numbers with lots of decimal places. Now that analysis comes after they conjecture that the percentages were fixed apriori. Th…

Another way of writing it out: How likely is it that you'd get these votes distributions 51.2000000% 44.2000000% 04.6000000% exactly? With all of those clean 0s? Very low. But it's also possible that there was sloppy reporting and the vote counts were re-processed at some point in the chain and rounded to one decimal place.

[deleted]