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Suspicious data pattern in recent Venezuelan election

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Re: Suspicious data pattern in recent Venezuelan election

#151

Post by marcosdumay »

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?

That's a really bad thing and a reason not to trust the entire system.

They should report the absolute number of votes at each counting station.

Re: Suspicious data pattern in recent Venezuelan election

#152

Post by tptacek »

culi wrote: post #146
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]

I'm not sure I understand this battle-of-experts thing happening here. The Venezuelan authorities released the vote totals. They work out to exactly 51.2% vs 44.2%. That did not happen in the real world. Could not have.

We don't need the Carter Foundation to tell us these results are false. They are manifestly false.

Re: Suspicious data pattern in recent Venezuelan election

#153

Post by zamadatix »

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.

I'd say it's extremely common to announce numbers of votes both as they come in and when the final total is known. Here in the US major news networks (ABC, CNN, Fox, 270towin, and others) all have live maps that show the total number of votes + total percentages during the voting period. They usually also let you hover over the states/counties to see the percentages and votes for the particular area.

E.g. here's the Fox map https://www.foxnews.com/elections/2020/general-results and total votes comes first in the same font as percentages marked to the side. During the election these totals and percentages are live numbers.

And in the US we're not even that interested in the popular vote since it's all about the electoral college which has historically not always aligned with the popular vote numbers anyways yet we still list the totals as they come in.

Re: Suspicious data pattern in recent Venezuelan election

#154

Post by stateofinquiry »

culi wrote: post #146
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]

I'd never heard of the National Lawyer's Guild. According to Wikipedia:

"The National Lawyers Guild (NLG) is a progressive public interest association of lawyers, law students, paralegals, jailhouse lawyers, law collective members, and other activist legal workers, in the United States."

"Activists" not generally compatible with "impartial". Some coverage of the situation I found very helpful is available here: https://www.readtangle.com/venezuela-elections-explained-mad....

(Edit: Fixed link)

Re: Suspicious data pattern in recent Venezuelan election

#155

Post by shusaku »

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.

The article has been updated to mention this theory

> Commenter Ryan points out that you could also explain this data pattern as a result of sloppy post-processing, if votes were counted correctly, then reported to the nearest percentage point, and then some intermediary mistakenly multiplied the (rounded) percentages by the total vote and reported that. I have no idea; you'd want to know where those particular numbers were coming from.

I’m inclined to believe this. It seems like if they had some grand conspiracy it’d be more likely for them to just add some votes here and there to the real number.

Re: Suspicious data pattern in recent Venezuelan election

#156

Post by amelius »

tomp wrote: post #51
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:

Tests should have checksums built into the correct answers.

Re: Suspicious data pattern in recent Venezuelan election

#157

Post by killingtime74 »

a0123 wrote: post #128
nikolay wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

[flagged]

In western countries power is handed over routinely amongst political enemies. So what, the incumbent is cooking the books to give power to their rival? If power is being handed over, where is the book cooking?

Here they are staying in power.

You think the Liberals in Australia wanted to give power over to Labor? You think Obama liked having Trump follow him? Macron cooked the votes so his own party lost the majority?

Re: Suspicious data pattern in recent Venezuelan election

#159

Post by noduerme »

a0123 wrote: post #128
nikolay wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

[flagged]

Or maybe western democracies do demand higher standards of transparency. Notice which countries called to congratulate Maduro immediately without waiting a day to find out if any the announced results were valid: Russia, Iran and Cuba. Paragons of liberty.

Re: Suspicious data pattern in recent Venezuelan election

#160

Post by stoperaticless »

a0123 wrote: post #128
nikolay wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

[flagged]

s/(non-)?western//g

> See when democracies do it, it's ¨just to make it simpler"

> When dictatorships do it, it's "fraud".

Seems plausible.

Credentials and reputation matter.

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