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Suspicious data pattern in recent Venezuelan election

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Re: Suspicious data pattern in recent Venezuelan election

#101

Post by ptero »

nikolay wrote: post #50
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.

If the vote numbers were not provided, this would not have been an issue. But in this case they did announce the vote numbers.

Re: Suspicious data pattern in recent Venezuelan election

#102

Post by the_af »

notjoemama wrote: post #84

I recall having read about elections in Africa and the troubles they faced. I can't find it now, but there was one particular website offering a very detailed but rigorous approach to determining the legitimacy of elections. I'll offer this article from the BBC as a stand in for the criteria (from 2016): https://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-37243190 Vote rigging: How to spot the tell-tale signs 1. Too many voters 2.…

> I would encourage anyone from Argentina

Surely you meant Venezuela?

Re: Suspicious data pattern in recent Venezuelan election

#103

Post by energy123 »

verbify wrote: post #90
gmaster1440 wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I'm in charge of forging a presidential election, how difficult is it for me to use realistic, "ugly" numbers to sell it more effectively?

This kind of mistake is easy to avoid. The problem is that there are a lot of potential mistakes that could be made, this is just one of them.

And the people doing the fraud aren't going to be computer scientists or statisticians. They were chosen for their loyalty to the dear leader.

Re: Suspicious data pattern in recent Venezuelan election

#104

Post by marinmania »

insane_dreamer wrote: post #81

Aren't percentages typically rounded? I don't see any US results where it's reported that X candidate got 51.31112341% of the vote even if that's correct. More likely they would announce 51.31% or maybe even just 51.3%. In fact, just looked up these results by CNN: https://www.cnn.com/election/2020/results/president So Biden is reported as receiving 51.3% of the votes which is reported as exactly 81,284,666 votes. Th…

Venezuela released the vote totals

https://www.albatcp.org/en/2024/07/29/cne-announced-nicolas-...

Their vote totals happen to align (almost perfectly) with round percentages

Fwiw most governments don't even report percentages. They just report totals and the percentages are added (by sites like CNN) for clarity

https://results.elections.ny.gov/document/468?page=1

Re: Suspicious data pattern in recent Venezuelan election

#105

Post by happyopossum »

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.

But that’s not what happened, if you read the article it actually expands everything out to the seventh decimal, and they’re not all zeros

Re: Suspicious data pattern in recent Venezuelan election

#106

Post by energy123 »

bearve wrote: post #96

The error in this analysis occurs due to the use of an Excel or LibreOffice spreadsheet that when the cell size is reduced it rounds to 51.2% and when it is increased it gives 51.199997136828

51.199997136828 is what you get when you do =ROUND(N_votes * 0.512)/N_votes. So it may as well be 51.2%.

Re: Suspicious data pattern in recent Venezuelan election

#107

Post by worstspotgain »

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.

It's technically possible that that was not their weed and their meth in their pants because those were not their pants. However when they have a mile-long rap sheet for selling drugs, it weakens their argument a bit.

Re: Suspicious data pattern in recent Venezuelan election

#108

Post by happyopossum »

SoftTalker wrote: post #27
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.

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

No, he got 51.1999971%. It’s right there in the second table of the article

Re: Suspicious data pattern in recent Venezuelan election

#110

Post by culi »

lawlessone wrote: post #93
culi wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

>Maduro has already vowed to release election data... Yeah and everyone's still waiting on D's tax returns. Promises have to be kept.

Okay. I don't have an opinion. I just think GP's specific wording was misleading

> which apparently it is never going to do

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