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Suspicious data pattern in recent Venezuelan election

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Re: Suspicious data pattern in recent Venezuelan election

#311

Post by ARandomerDude »

berdario wrote: post #215
rcardo11 wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maduro just responded to a journalist from the Washington Post that they will not be able to show the local vote tallies now because, at this moment, the National Electoral Council is in “a cyber battle never seen before.”

I was curious to check the National Electoral Council website, to get their latest tally straight from the source... http://www.cne.gov.ve/ And the website is currently not loading. They might simply be struggling to keep up with traffic, but being under some kind of "cyber attack" is also plausible

This would also be fairly trivial to fake if you wanted to appear to be under attack.

Re: Suspicious data pattern in recent Venezuelan election

#312

Post by tptacek »

culi wrote: post #302
eirikbakke wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here is the CNE press conference where the numbers were announced: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pB7g4y4M4s8

Wonderful, thanks! I really struggled to find this. Funnily enough they give different percentages. 51.1% to 44.2% round and round we go

No. The percentages reported don't matter. These are the same absolute vote numbers; the percentage they work out to is what matters.

This seems to be tripping a lot of people up.

Re: Suspicious data pattern in recent Venezuelan election

#313

Post by Terr_ »

stouset wrote: post #241
DonsDiscountGas wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not difficult at all. Just pick the approximate numbers you want and then introduce a random error of a few percent. (Normal, uniform, doesn't really matter). This is also not hard for statistics experts to detect, but it's much harder to prove (aka you've got plausible deniability). One wonders why they didn't even bother to do fraud slightly better.

Unless done carefully this will almost certainly fail Benford’s Law. Manipulating statistics is harder than you think.

> Unless done carefully this will almost certainly fail Benford’s Law.

IIRC Benford's law relies upon things that have power-law underpinnings, such as iterated growth% at different rates. In contrast, relative vote amounts at a given point in time don't have many ways to exhibit that, particularly when the total number of voters is fixed rather than having voters divide like bacteria during polling day.

However it might work if you were checking the growth in total eligible voters in different locations over time.

I like to imagine Benford's Law a bit like throwing randomly distributed darts through the air at a paper target, exept the target is graph paper with log-10 subdivisions. The "leading 1" zones are simply bigger targets. [0]

[0] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Logarithmic_scale.sv...

Re: Suspicious data pattern in recent Venezuelan election

#314

Post by IAmGraydon »

sien wrote: post #233
colimbarna wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks. Note to self: Next time I want to rig election results, generate a random integer between 54.2% and 54.3% of the vote and count it as the winner's vote, subtract from total pool, wash rinse repeat.

It's remarkable that they don't do this. The sheer incompetence of the Maduro government and other governments that rig election results is surprising.

Well, yes, but I think you are vastly overestimating the percentage of the population that would even think of this. Countries like Venezuela have a major problem with brain drain as it is. There's very little chance they would think to get a competent statistician involved in rigging their election. They're just simple numbers, right? You don't know what you don't know.

Re: Suspicious data pattern in recent Venezuelan election

#315

Post by GolberThorce »

yongjik wrote: post #172
nikolay wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've never seen any preliminary results announcing numbers of votes - it's always rounded up percentages with 1 or 2 decimals.

In my country (Korea) they broadcast vote counts, per district, in real time as data pours in from all over the country. It's a big entertainment going on for the whole night. And you can log onto the website of the office of the election commission and see raw numbers by each voting district. It's 2024; I'd consider it a minimum level of government competency if anyone wants to be called a democratic country.

[flagged]

Re: Suspicious data pattern in recent Venezuelan election

#316

Post by bilbo0s »

ARandomerDude wrote: post #311
berdario wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was curious to check the National Electoral Council website, to get their latest tally straight from the source... http://www.cne.gov.ve/ And the website is currently not loading. They might simply be struggling to keep up with traffic, but being under some kind of "cyber attack" is also plausible

This would also be fairly trivial to fake if you wanted to appear to be under attack.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but you wouldn't have to fake anything if you just didn't use electronic voting.

Simply give a ballot to every voter and have them fill it out. Especially nowadays, as pretty much every election in every nation will come under cyber attack precisely because they are using electronic voting and hackers can manipulate the votes.

If I were being ungenerous, I would say all the politicians want electronic voting everywhere because they can manipulate it with cyber attacks.

Re: Suspicious data pattern in recent Venezuelan election

#317

Post by berdario »

akdev1l wrote: post #276
culi wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Each local voting location prints out its own ballot results. These are available to any local who wants to see them. Independent analyzers are putting together photos of these print-outs right now to try to confirm or challenge the results as we speak. As in the US, independent citizens volunteer to run and oversee these ballot locations. It would be impossible for Maduro to "permanently [hide] local election tallie…

There is a literal website posted by the opposition. 1. Aggregated reports: https://resultadosconvzla.com/ 2. Raw images of the voting records: https://resultadospresidencialesvenezuela2024.com/ The second requires a Venezuelan ID as input as it will identify the specific voting record for the person. I gathered all the records and put them in an archive: https://public.akdev.xyz/ganovzla2024.tar.gz The voting record…

I was curious to understand what exactly are those raw images of the voting records.

Apparently the ID of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tarek_William_Saab is publicly known ( 8.459.301 )

So, thanks to that I've been able to check the "acta de escrutinio" of the El Carmen paroquia...

That indeed looks plausible, but do we have any Venezuelan here that can corroborate that this website shows the same "acta de escrutinio" that locals can request from their polling station?

I mean, allegedly this is a grassroots effort with all of the acta painstakingly aggregated... But the website is controlled by the opposition, so they could've just been made up (just like the numbers from CNE could be made up)

Re: Suspicious data pattern in recent Venezuelan election

#318

Post by GolberThorce »

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.…

This criteria is erroneous as the 2020 US election proved. The UN updated its Election Observation standards, and Venezuela's election mostly passes them.

Re: Suspicious data pattern in recent Venezuelan election

#319

Post by refurb »

DonsDiscountGas wrote: post #99
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?

Not difficult at all. Just pick the approximate numbers you want and then introduce a random error of a few percent. (Normal, uniform, doesn't really matter). This is also not hard for statistics experts to detect, but it's much harder to prove (aka you've got plausible deniability). One wonders why they didn't even bother to do fraud slightly better.

But votes aren’t tallied in one location, districts individually tally.

So now you’ve got to force each of those districts to change the numbers.

Re: Suspicious data pattern in recent Venezuelan election

#320

Post by cmg »

tptacek wrote: post #297
cmg wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[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.

The comment I’m replying to says they’re “the only impartial observers who were in Venezuela for the election,” so I think the point stands - given their funding and connection to the US government and international capital, they can’t be considered impartial in this situation.
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