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Suspicious data pattern in recent Venezuelan election

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Re: Suspicious data pattern in recent Venezuelan election

#351

Post by foobarqux »

lolinder wrote: post #336
foobarqux wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Because voting results are universally reported as percentages, that's what everyone uses and understands.

Re: Suspicious data pattern in recent Venezuelan election

#352

Post by SV_BubbleTime »

guywithahat wrote: post #348

This is why you don’t vote away your right to bear arms

True.

But might not be a popular comment here. It seems many think you can carbon tax out of any problem.

There is one logical resolution to where Venezuela finds themselves. No one really believes they’re going to pull out of this economic situation, nor now this political one.

Re: Suspicious data pattern in recent Venezuelan election

#353

Post by lolinder »

foobarqux wrote: post #351
lolinder wrote: post #336

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Because voting results are universally reported as percentages, that's what everyone uses and understands.

No, they are universally reported in raw numbers accompanied by percentages, as indeed they were here. The raw numbers are universally understood to be derived from the percentages and not vice versa. The votes are the ground truth.

That's how elections always work. The votes are what counts, the percentages are an abstraction to make the votes easier to parse. Any government agency that doesn't operate that way doesn't understand democracy, even if they weren't committing outright fraud.

Re: Suspicious data pattern in recent Venezuelan election

#354

Post by foobarqux »

olalonde wrote: post #300
foobarqux wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Because maybe they didn't have direct access to the original numbers? You can't understand that some consumer of the data might not get the original CSV only some summary?

Re: Suspicious data pattern in recent Venezuelan election

#355

Post by tptacek »

foobarqux wrote: post #347
tptacek wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They reported vote counts for both candidates that were fictitious. I don't understand how anybody can rationalize that. I'm no fan of Maduro but I care about the politics of the region a lot less than I do about the mathematics of the situation. It's alarming to see people try to back-rationalize how these numbers could have been legitimate because, for instance (elsewhere on this thread), "it would have been easy f…

As I and others (including in the original article) have explained it is a plausible result to create legitimately. Given the context that unsubstantiated vote-rigging allegations have occurred in the past (and the dire consequences of destabilizing a government based on false claims) extreme skepticism is warranted.

You can tell a story about a process that publishes these numbers in good faith, but not a story in which the vote counts reported are anything other than fictitious. It is not, in fact, an ordinary sequence of events to take true counts, work out their percentages, round them, discard the original counts, and work back new counts from the rounded percentages. Those new counts are a lie, no matter what the process was.

The rest of this, I don't care.

Re: Suspicious data pattern in recent Venezuelan election

#356

Post by SV_BubbleTime »

throwaway14356 wrote: post #324

if only we had secure computing devices. Imagine a useful application of blockchain. A historic first :p

In the US we have known-flawed closed-source machines where the company executives that make them also make clearly political statements that favor the side that used to be against those machines.

I have zero confidence they’re going to leap frog the US in election security.

Retro. Paper, no mail, vote one day on a holiday, count by that night, all manual all reviewed.

This just is not somewhere we need a high tech solution.

Re: Suspicious data pattern in recent Venezuelan election

#357

Post by tptacek »

foobarqux wrote: post #351
lolinder wrote: post #336

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Because voting results are universally reported as percentages, that's what everyone uses and understands.

Reporting just the percentages makes sense. Reporting rounded versions of those percentages not only makes sense, but is the universal idiom for reporting percentages. But reporting synthesized vote counts from the percentages --- even from non-rounded percentages --- is not normal.

People on this thread are hung up on the reported percentages, but those don't matter in this analysis at all. They're not the problem. The problem is the counts themselves. Discard the reported percentages entirely; exact same critique, one statistics students would spot instantly.

Re: Suspicious data pattern in recent Venezuelan election

#358

Post by rafaelm »

culi wrote: post #145
DonnyV wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

I can't find much about the Carter Foundation, but Edison Polling—the organization that released the exit poll that showed the opposition winning— does have a long history of criticism for being US-backed and consistently producing results that favor US interests. Meanwhile, the most respected pollster in the country, Hinterlaces, released an exit poll that estimated right around the actual results (54% vs 51%) https…

Calling Hinterlaces "the most respected" is quiiiite a stretch. The owner Oscar Schemel, frequently parrots the govt propaganda talking points ("it's the evil empire, there's no inflation it's sabotage etc)

Re: Suspicious data pattern in recent Venezuelan election

#359

Post by SV_BubbleTime »

pydry wrote: post #281
knowaveragejoe wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah, this is hardly the US government trying to stage their own coup. But it tracks with their history when they did try such things themselves.

It was just planned in the US and executed with logistical support from the US with a green light given by Trump (who announced he had no "direct" role in the operation).

That’s crazy you were in the room for that decision. Can you tell us more?

Re: Suspicious data pattern in recent Venezuelan election

#360

Post by rafaelm »

berdario wrote: post #275
grumple wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are impartial if you consider relentlessly pushing radical communist agendas and disregarding information that hurts your political allies to be impartial. More uncomfortable facts: Maduro has killed tens of thousands of political dissidents nearly 8 million Venezuelans have fled the country under his regime [0]. And exit polls overwhelmingly favored the opposition [1]. 0. https://www.unrefugees.org/emergencies/…

Exit polls favored Maduro at 54% of the votes: https://x.com/Hinterlaces/status/1817599369471799639 The exit poll that you referred to, is by EdisonResearch EdisonResearch is based in New Jersey, and doesn't have any prior experience with exit polls in Venezuela: https://web.archive.org/web/20180528045149/https://www.ediso... I've also seen claims that they get funding from USAID, though I haven't been able to confir…

Hinterlaces is a government linked company, not exactly impartial.
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