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Suspicious data pattern in recent Venezuelan election

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Re: Suspicious data pattern in recent Venezuelan election

#361

Post by foobarqux »

lolinder wrote: post #353
foobarqux wrote: post #351

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 does…

First these were intermediate results. Second virtually no one reads or understands raw tallies, I don't know anyone who would or could quote them in any election. The final result, the result that is published as a headline in the newspaper are the rounded percentages.

No one is saying that the percentages are not derived from the raw tallies they are saying that it might be that somewhere in the game of telephone to the person that goes on TV and reports only the percentages were communicated and they realized they should put the tallies in too so they imputed them from the numbers they had, the total votes cast and the percentages (and naively it seems obviously okay to do that).

Re: Suspicious data pattern in recent Venezuelan election

#362

Post by tptacek »

roenxi wrote: post #349
tptacek wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sorry, but I don't know what any of this has to do with the vote counts reported here, which are mathematically guaranteed to be fictitious.

The vote count is always fictitious. The tolerances on counting a vote aren't that detailed - if someone says that a candidate got ~10 million votes and gives a figure accurate to a single vote that isn't a true number. I've had family members help count votes and I can guarantee that mistakes are made, and there is the obvious point that in a multi-million person election there is probably going to be fraud in there…

I can't see what this has to do with the analysis. Obviously, the counts themselves are subject to error, but it takes even more manipulation of vote counting to express counts that work out to round percentages, given error, not less.

Meanwhile: it is definitely not the case that the norm is to simply make up the vote counts, or to back them out from percentages.

You can certainly tell stories about how this publication isn't a smoking gun for the election, but they will all involve some deliberate manipulation of the numbers; for instance, you can try to rationalize a story where someone took the original vote counts, worked the percentages out, rounded them (so far so good), then discarded the original counts (uhhhhh) and synthesized new ones (triple yikes).

(I'm sorry to keep hedging this way, but I have to say again: cards on the table I think Maduro is awful, but my interest in this story is in the statistical anomaly, not the politics --- this for me is like that time HN got all wound up believing Google was dragnetting searches for pressure cookers after the Marathon bombing, which flunked plausibility due to a similar statistical argument; I like a pressure cooker, sure, but my real thing there was the base rate fallacy).

Re: Suspicious data pattern in recent Venezuelan election

#363

Post by lolinder »

foobarqux wrote: post #361
lolinder wrote: post #353

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 does…

First these were intermediate results. Second virtually no one reads or understands raw tallies, I don't know anyone who would or could quote them in any election. The final result, the result that is published as a headline in the newspaper are the rounded percentages. No one is saying that the percentages are not derived from the raw tallies they are saying that it might be that somewhere in the game of telephone t…

> it might be that somewhere in the game of telephone to the person that goes on TV and reports only the percentages were communicated and they realized they should put the tallies in too so they imputed them from the numbers they had

And I'm telling you that anyone who handles votes this way doesn't understand democracy. The best case scenario here is that the Venezuelan government doesn't really care about the vote tally (which is, again, bad, because the votes are the thing). The worst case is that they fabricated it entirely. Neither one speaks well for the state of democracy in Venezuela.

Re: Suspicious data pattern in recent Venezuelan election

#364

Post by foobarqux »

tptacek wrote: post #357
foobarqux wrote: post #351

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

Maybe I don't understand what you have identified as the problem. My understanding of the article is that the raw tallies should not correspond to "precise" rounded percentages. The article in an addendum points out one way that could legitimately occur (some underling has the totals and rounded percentages but needs the raw tallies and naively multiplies to get them).

Re: Suspicious data pattern in recent Venezuelan election

#365

Post by lolinder »

foobarqux wrote: post #354
olalonde wrote: post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

A summary that includes the exact number of votes cast and the percent for each candidate but not the breakdown by candidate?

Why would someone go out of their way to construct a CSV that has the tally by candidate removed* but still has the total vote count? What would that CSV even look like?

* Yes, the tally would have to be removed, because presumably there's a spreadsheet somewhere that was used to generate percentages from tallies.

Re: Suspicious data pattern in recent Venezuelan election

#366

Post by foobarqux »

tptacek wrote: post #355
foobarqux wrote: post #347

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 w…

The entire issue is whether it was a "good faith" mistake. If you concede that...

Re: Suspicious data pattern in recent Venezuelan election

#367

Post by culi »

tptacek wrote: post #312
culi wrote: post #302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It certainly does! Watch the video. No total number is ever reported

This means that "total votes" number was worked backwards by a third party. It's not even the CNE's fuckup

Re: Suspicious data pattern in recent Venezuelan election

#368

Post by rafaelm »

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

It's cne.gob.ve, and that doesn't work either. They want us to believe that because the website is down, the whole system that counts the votes is down. Hey, maybe the votes are counted in WordPress...

Re: Suspicious data pattern in recent Venezuelan election

#369

Post by beaglesss »

manoweb wrote: post #230
oceanplexian wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess it might be quite ironic but if people want to vote in a dictatorship, don’t they have the right to under a true democracy?

Pure democracies will ALWAYS vote themselves into dictatorships. That is why Constitutional Republics that use representation are more long-term stable.

It's not clear to me constitutional republics are superior to monarchy for stability.

Re: Suspicious data pattern in recent Venezuelan election

#370

Post by key1234 »

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…

How did Astavista gather these records? If they are submitted by the voters and if the research group is opposition funded, it could very well be that more opposition voters submitted? Genuine question because this is such a huge discrepancy and surely if its true, Maduro can't get away with it and he must know.
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