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Suspicious data pattern in recent Venezuelan election

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Re: Suspicious data pattern in recent Venezuelan election

#51

Post by tomp »

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…

My favourite part of my math education, solutions were always nice.

Compute the eigenvalues of a random-looking (but still integers) 4x4 matrix? Oh, it's sqrt(2), I probably didn't make an error in the calculation.

Then came the advanced physics / mechanics exam. It threw a wrench into our beautiful system. The results were just about anything, incredibly ugly, like the real world :yuck: :vomit:

Re: Suspicious data pattern in recent Venezuelan election

#52

Post by noitpmeder »

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.

This comment perfectly distills this post.

Re: Suspicious data pattern in recent Venezuelan election

#53

Post by sanex »

pydry wrote: post #23
sanex wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I spent 5 weeks in Venezuela this year.

Re: Suspicious data pattern in recent Venezuelan election

#54

Post by tomrod »

solids wrote: post #37
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.

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Re: Suspicious data pattern in recent Venezuelan election

#55

Post by KennyBlanken »

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?!

It's...rarely to never done? The exact counts are nearly always provided by voting officials.

The press might summarize an election in whole numbers and maybe round up, but...that's very different from voting officials doing it.

Re: Suspicious data pattern in recent Venezuelan election

#56

Post by melenaboija »

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 same probability as any combination of three results with 7 decimals and adding up to 100.

Re: Suspicious data pattern in recent Venezuelan election

#57

Post by [deleted] »

suzzer99 wrote: post #17

More on this. The Carter Foundation, the only impartial observers who were in Venezuela for the election, and who previously defended Venezuela's election system following Chavez's 2004 win, has called on Maduro's government to release local vote tallies, which apparently it is never going to do: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/31/world/americas/venezuela-...

[deleted]

Re: Suspicious data pattern in recent Venezuelan election

#59

Post by mihaaly »

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.

True in general, but here "the President of the National Electoral Commission announced the winner". Sloppy in this situation equals malicious. And I wonder who gave the president the numbers to calculate with. ; )

Re: Suspicious data pattern in recent Venezuelan election

#60

Post by einpoklum »

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…

The odds are, that if you go looking for any one of multiple low-probability events, one of them will be found to have happened.
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