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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

#121

Post by jvanderbot »

achempion wrote: post #41
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 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?

The question is "How likely is it that humans would begin with those numbers when fudging?" answer is low.

But clean numbers? Much more likely.

Re: Suspicious data pattern in recent Venezuelan election

#122

Post by a0123 »

gmaster1440 wrote: post #69
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…

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?

No you see, they had the perfect plan.

But they got foiled by that one thing they always forget at every single election (that never gets brought up when your government agrees with the result, because in that case it's just a "statistical anomaly" or "shit happens sometimes")

Re: Suspicious data pattern in recent Venezuelan election

#124

Post by ChadNauseam »

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 other commenters point at the explanation but don't explain it rigorously IMO. Here's how I'd say it.

60% is a nice, round percentage. In an honest election, this is just as likely to be reported as any nearby percentage, like 59.7% or 60.3%. As you mention, any particular percentage is equally (and extremely) unlikely. SUppose this you estimate the chance of this occurring, given an honest election, is 1/1000.

60% however is a much more likely outcome if the election results were faked sloppily. A sloppy fake is reasonably likely to say "Well, why not just say we won 60%". Suppose you estimate the chance of this occurring, given a sloppily faked election, are 1/100.

Bayes' theorem tells us that we can use this information to "update our beliefs" in favor of the election being faked sloppily and away from the election being honest. Say we previously (before seeing this evidence) thought the honest:faked odds were 5:1. That is, we felt it was 5 times more likely that it was honest than that it was sloppily faked. We can then multiply the "honest" by 1/1000 (chance of seeing this if it was honest), and the "faked" by 1/100 (chance of seeing this if it was faked), to get new odds of (5 * 1/1000):(1 * 1/100), which simplifies to 1:2. So in light of the new evidence, and assuming these numbers that I made up, it seems twice as likely that the election was faked.

This exact analysis of course relies on numbers I made up, but the critical thing to see here is that as long as we're more likely to see this result given the election being faked than given it being honest, it is evidence of it being faked.

Re: Suspicious data pattern in recent Venezuelan election

#125

Post by tryauuum »

a0123 wrote: post #119
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…

[flagged]

I don't understand your logic.

"The easiest thing to do" is to do less thinking, less mathematical operations

Re: Suspicious data pattern in recent Venezuelan election

#128

Post by a0123 »

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?!

[flagged]

Re: Suspicious data pattern in recent Venezuelan election

#129

Post by colordrops »

ThinkBeat wrote: post #114

[flagged]

Most people in the US aren't even aware of the constant State Department and CIA effort to overturn democracy in Venezuela so they can appoint a US corporation friendly leader.

Columbia Uni is a hotbed for State Department types. This is clearly a concerted effort to create a narrative. The US doesn't even allow external election monitors for its own elections. At least Venezuela had some level of monitoring. The hypocrisy is abject.

Re: Suspicious data pattern in recent Venezuelan election

#130

Post by culi »

worstspotgain wrote: post #107
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.

What's the mile long rap sheet though? The group that's alleging fraud (AltaVista) is using images of printed receipts from different voting places as a sample to estimate the final vote. That group also said it's same technique resulted in election outcomes that are within 2 points or less of the announced outcome for 2021, 2018, and 2015.

This seems like a new and unique accusation for Venezuela

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/31/world/americas/venezuela-...

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