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Suspicious data pattern in recent Venezuelan election

statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu

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Re: Suspicious data pattern in recent Venezuelan election

#41

Post by achempion »

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.

The numbers are definitely sus, but what if they were

    52.2543689%
    44.2689426%
    04.6345625%
How likely is it that you'd get these votes distributions exactly with these exact tails? Compared to all other possibilities?

Re: Suspicious data pattern in recent Venezuelan election

#44

Post by KennyBlanken »

dinobones wrote: post #22

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 ge…

It's called "digit tests" and it was further theorized that the last digit had a particularly even distribution in natural, honest elections.

Further research showed that last digit test wasn't very good - there are multiple obvious counters to the test.

Re: Suspicious data pattern in recent Venezuelan election

#47

Post by neura »

Waterluvian wrote: post #8
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.

Yes. For one set. But if your next lottery is 4,5,6,7,8,9 and then 11,12,13,14,15,16 it becomes improbable. The issue here is that a bunch of the percentages imply super round numbers. The signal isn’t that there’s a round number. It’s that they’re all round numbers.

I've tried to explain this a couple of times, but I keep falling back on the calculations used to show the problem (that it's not the numbers themselves, but the pattern). This comment nailed it with simply "It's that they're all round numbers". I've always been terrible at rephrasing things to make stronger points in a more concise way. Thanks! :D

Re: Suspicious data pattern in recent Venezuelan election

#49

Post by kadoban »

nikolay wrote: post #40
dinobones wrote: post #22

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 ge…

What's wrong with announcing results with rounded percentages?!

Nothing. The problem is when you obviously picked the rounded percentages that sounded good first and then calculated the number of votes from that.

Re: Suspicious data pattern in recent Venezuelan election

#50

Post by nikolay »

stapled_socks wrote: post #25

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.

I've never seen any preliminary results announcing numbers of votes - it's always rounded up percentages with 1 or 2 decimals.
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