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Suspicious data pattern in recent Venezuelan election

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Re: Suspicious data pattern in recent Venezuelan election

#291

Post by noobermin »

The point of the article which I missed: the issue here is that the vote totals are very close to their 0.1% place roundings after multiplying the total votes times the percentages, suggesting that the vote totals were simply faked by taking the total votes and multiplying them by percentages precise only to the 0.1% place.

I had mistakenly thought the quoted twitter post found it weird that the vote totals had the same leading digits as the percentages, which absolutely makes sense when the total vote count is near a multiple of 100. For example

  >>> 0.5123 * 1_002_232
  513443.45359999995
I had pulled an all-nighter (writing a grant proposal actually) and was steaming mad reading this and had to scroll a bit. May be a comment like this will help someone else out who might be confused.

Re: Suspicious data pattern in recent Venezuelan election

#292

Post by ra »

cmg wrote: post #278
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]

Is anyone really impartial?

Re: Suspicious data pattern in recent Venezuelan election

#293

Post by timthorn »

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:

> Oh, it's sqrt(2), I probably didn't make an error in the calculation

You remind me of my university maths exam. In all the past papers, the eigenvalues came out to be round numbers. But in the real paper I sat, no matter how many times I tried to find my mistake, they didn't. I wasted hours of the exam on that.

It was the professor's final year before his retirement.

Re: Suspicious data pattern in recent Venezuelan election

#294

Post by culi »

mihaaly wrote: post #59
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. ; )

Sure, and it's only "80%" (another sloppy-looking number) of the count, but these numbers are still useful in that it'd be an insurmountable lead. Independent decision desks don't wait for exact final tallies to call a race. It will likely take weeks for every single vote to be fully counted.

I agree this is at least sloppy work though. Apparently the explanation for the delay in full results is an ongoing cyber attack

Re: Suspicious data pattern in recent Venezuelan election

#295

Post by chrisjharris »

cmg wrote: post #278
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]

How should they be funded, for you to consider them impartial?

Re: Suspicious data pattern in recent Venezuelan election

#297

Post by tptacek »

cmg wrote: post #278
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]

The issue in this post has nothing to do with any of the outside election observers. You could replace the Carter Foundation with the CIA itself and you'd still be left with the same problem, which is that these vote counts are fictitious.

Re: Suspicious data pattern in recent Venezuelan election

#298

Post by culi »

olalonde wrote: post #252
culi wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It seems Maduro was way behind in the polls. https://www.as-coa.org/articles/poll-tracker-venezuelas-2024...

Depends which polls you're looking at. So far, no non-US-linked pollsters have shown Maduro behind (that is, behind the US backed opposition candidate). If you look at something like Hinterlaces you get a very different picture

Re: Suspicious data pattern in recent Venezuelan election

#299

Post by jml7c5 »

wesselbindt wrote: post #248

[flagged]

>it seems like there's no evidence of the government posting these vote tallies

They were released at a press conference. They read out both the numbers and the percentages. See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pB7g4y4M4s8

It is still plausible that this is an Excel error, but it's certainly suspicious.

Re: Suspicious data pattern in recent Venezuelan election

#300

Post by olalonde »

foobarqux wrote: post #270
olalonde wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unlikely, the person making the announcement was an official from the national electoral council (Consejo Nacional Electoral). There's no reason the national electoral council wouldn't have access to the exact counts and would have to work their way backwards from percentages. Source: https://x.com/yvangil/status/1817787106237743565

Yes but that guy certainly didn't tally the votes himself, someone gave him the numbers (and someone else gave him those numbers). It's plausible that in some step only the (rounded) percentages and overall total were given and then someone downstream imputed the counts.

It's possible but not very plausible. Why would the official organization charged with overseeing the elections knowingly report inaccurate numbers when it has access to the accurate numbers?
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