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Suspicious data pattern in recent Venezuelan election

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Re: Suspicious data pattern in recent Venezuelan election

#71

Post by staunton »

melenaboija wrote: post #56
tumult wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The question isn't "probability you get those exact numbers". It's "probability that you get numbers which all have at most N decimal places".

Re: Suspicious data pattern in recent Venezuelan election

#72

Post by culi »

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-...

[flagged]

Re: Suspicious data pattern in recent Venezuelan election

#73

Post by contravariant »

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.

Well there weren't zeros but within rounding error it was exact.

That actually gives a way to estimate the probability. There's 1002 choose 2 ways to divide 1000 permils over the 3 options. While there's 10 058 776 choose 2 ways to divide the 10 058 774 votes. That works out to about 1e-8 of the possible results being an exact multiple of 0.1% up to rounding error.

Of course an actual election doesn't simply pick one of the possible results at random (heck even if everyone voted randomly that wouldn't be the case). However these 'suspicious' results are distributed in a very uniform stratified fashion, any probability distribution that's much wider than 0.1% would approximately result in the same 1e-8 probability. And pretty much no reasonable person would expect a priori that the vote would result in such a suspicious number with such a high accuracy, so this should be considered strong evidence of fraud to most people.

Re: Suspicious data pattern in recent Venezuelan election

#74

Post by jiveturkey »

> That seems fishy

They didn't explain why and it wasn't obvious to me. I had to think embarrassingly long about it.

It's because the tally by extended decimal shows that each of the 3 rows show that the tally was back-filled from a one-decimal-place desired result. With only 3 rows I'm not so sure how strongly this proves anything but it certainly is fishy.

EDIT: oh wait they do explain it. But only after they stated the conclusion so matter-of-factly first. I'd stopped reading because right then and there I thought I missed some fact or point earlier, or that they otherwise were presenting it as obvious and why wasn't it obvious to me?

Re: Suspicious data pattern in recent Venezuelan election

#75

Post by NJRBailey »

whalesalad wrote: post #61

Anyone else stuck in an endless "Verifying you are human. This may take a few seconds." cloudflare captcha loop?

I get this due to a browser extension I have (in my case it is the extension FreeTree, but chances are you aren't using that). Maybe try disabling all extensions and try the captcha again?

Re: Suspicious data pattern in recent Venezuelan election

#76

Post by kadoban »

nikolay wrote: post #66
kadoban wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Not necessarily. If the person announcing was given the number of votes and rounded percentages, then this could explain it. For example, in my country, they always report only turnout as a percentage with a single decimal and the share of each candidate/party with up to 2 decimals, never the number of votes - who cares about the absolute numbers anyway?

A possibility, but not a good one. Depending on your goal, you either care a _lot_ about the raw number (in which case doing that calculation is _insane_), or you don't care really at all (so...why would you calculate it?).

Re: Suspicious data pattern in recent Venezuelan election

#77

Post by enoch_r »

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.

If the lottery administrator's daughter wins the lottery, he may say "no, no - don't you see, her probability of getting the winning numbers is exactly the same as anyone else's!"

But in reality, we can say that:

- her probability of winning in the world where her father is cheating is very high

- her probability of winning in the world where her father isn't cheating is very low

Together these two facts give us evidence about which world we're actually inhabiting - though of course we can never be completely certain!

In the same way, yes, it's equally (im)probable that the winning percent will be 51.211643879% or 51.200000000%. But the latter is more likely to occur in a world where Maduro said "get me 51.2% of the votes" and someone just did that mechanically with a pocket calculator, which is good evidence about which world we live in.

Re: Suspicious data pattern in recent Venezuelan election

#78

Post by kgwgk »

nikolay wrote: post #67
paxys wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The didn’t announce the percentages, they announced the vote counts.

Why is that article not pointing to the source? I've looked for it, and I couldn't find it.

https://x.com/yvangil/status/1817787106237743565

Re: Suspicious data pattern in recent Venezuelan election

#79

Post by forgetfulness »

culi wrote: post #72
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-...

[flagged]

Maduro is also saying that the mass protests he's facing are the product of Chilean-trained operatives acting against him, he says many things.

Re: Suspicious data pattern in recent Venezuelan election

#80

Post by NikolaNovak »

alephnerd wrote: post #63
consumer451 wrote: post #33

This is a bit of an aside, but as a geopolitical news junkie, what I keep searching on Google News is: Venezuela election Lula How his government reacts is going to be a major factor. Given Lula's past dedication to Chavezism, his post-election reaction has made me hopeful for change in Venezuela. What is directly related to TFA is that both the USA and Brazil want to see the voting data. https://www.reuters.com/worl…

> Given Lula's past dedication to (sic) Chavezism Brazil has quasi-presidential system, but it's Chamber of Deputies has the actual power. In the 2000s, Lula's PT was the largest party (usually around 20-25% of the total seats) and could as such strongarm smaller leftist parties into a governing coalition with an absolute majority. Lula won the presidential election in 2022, but his party PT was the 3rd largest, and…

Axios is easy, butdo you mind expanding the acronyms to true newbs in the field? :)

BTW, how truly bad is Stratfor really these days?I had a subscription more than a decade ago and appreciated their geopolitical analysis essay format which provided the history, background, big picture, then detail and their forecast. Never cared much if their forecast was on the money, it was the human readable background which I found interesting :)

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