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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

#331

Post by lolinder »

KennyBlanken wrote: post #44
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…

It's called "digit tests" and it was further theorized that the last digit had a particularly even distribution in natural, honest elections. Further research showed that last digit test wasn't very good - there are multiple obvious counters to the test.

This isn't a digit test, though—the giveaway here isn't a problem with the last digit (or any single digit), the giveaway is that the vote tallies reported exactly match what you would arrive at if you attempted to derive them from nice round 3-digit percentages.

Re: Suspicious data pattern in recent Venezuelan election

#333

Post by berdario »

culi wrote: post #287
akdev1l wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Exactly my point, thanks! This form of analysis has been used to verify the validity of past election results. All were within 2 points of forecasts based on this data. We still don't have enough results to do this type of analysis yet, but we surely will eventually. The group that did the analysis you're linking is AltaVista. They are linked with the opposition, but their same analysis validated past results. Their…

https://resultadosconvzla.com/

Claims

Actas digitalizadas: 24.576 (81,85%)

> Their current analysis obviously doesn't but they also admit that their sample is biased towards anti-Maduro centers.

If that's true, 81% of the total would already be quite representative (and less subject to be biased by anti-Maduro constituencies being overrrepresented)

Re: Suspicious data pattern in recent Venezuelan election

#334

Post by ordu »

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?

Generate 10,058,744 random floating numbers from [0,1), and count how many will fall into each of the intervals: [0, 0.522), [0.522, 0.522+0.442), or [0.522+0.442, 1). You can do it with less calculations if you know how to generate random numbers from binomial distribution. Then you should calculate percentages from these three numbers just to be sure they are right.

It is not difficult at all, but it needs some basic programming skills and some basic knowledge of statistics.

Re: Suspicious data pattern in recent Venezuelan election

#336

Post by lolinder »

foobarqux wrote: post #265
forgetfulness wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The thing is, that the absolute number of votes work out to give the announced percentage with 6 decimal digits, just as if they put "51.2%" on a calculator and worked backwards. The point is that they didn't actually round the percentage, it was actually 51.199999 for the President and 44.199999 for the opposition, the only credible explanation is that they picked the percentages and then cooked the absolute numbers…

As they say in the article one explanation is the guy publishing the numbers was not given the actual counts only the percentages and imputed the counts on his own.

That's fishy in its own right. The absolute vote tallies are the key thing in a democratic election. The percentages are a derived value to quickly make sense of the vote tallies, but the vote tallies are the actual results. Why would you need to derive vote tallies from percentages when you derived the percentages from the tallies?

It'd be like feeding your English marketing copy into Google translate to Spanish and back and using that instead of the original copy.

Re: Suspicious data pattern in recent Venezuelan election

#338

Post by pvg »

cmg wrote: post #320
tptacek wrote: post #297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It might have been overstated but it's pretty tangential to the discussion. You can just imagine the poster made a typo, if that helps, and move on - the results look fishy and people have asked for the data. We don't really need to reconstruct the origin story of every asker.

Re: Suspicious data pattern in recent Venezuelan election

#339

Post by [deleted] »

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]

[deleted]

Re: Suspicious data pattern in recent Venezuelan election

#340

Post by lolinder »

slantedview wrote: post #337

[flagged]

The US can be trying to overthrow the government and said government can also be corrupt and undemocratic. The context doesn't take away from the fact that these numbers are impossible, and your comment doesn't offer any explanation for them.
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