Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Suspicious data pattern in recent Venezuelan election

statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

401–410 of 536 posts

Re: Suspicious data pattern in recent Venezuelan election

#401

Post by BurningFrog »

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?

It's not hard for you or me.

But for the brutal thugs running Venezuela, it is a very advanced conept.

Re: Suspicious data pattern in recent Venezuelan election

#403

Post by Axsuul »

SV_BubbleTime wrote: post #356
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 s…

We do need a better solution because running elections is very expensive while voter participation is not great if you have to show up in person.

Re: Suspicious data pattern in recent Venezuelan election

#404

Post by fragmede »

BurningFrog wrote: post #401
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?

It's not hard for you or me. But for the brutal thugs running Venezuela, it is a very advanced conept.

it's like Russia killing someone with polonium. Hitting 60% exactly sends a message to anyone with the bright idea of running against the brutal thug's preferred candidate that it might not be a good idea, because there are brutal thugs involved.

Re: Suspicious data pattern in recent Venezuelan election

#405

Post by worewood »

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?

Depends on if you're in on it with the forgers or if you're against it but being forced to do it. It's the perfect clue to leave in, as its intention is plausibly deniable and you can tip statisticians to uncover the fraud.

Re: Suspicious data pattern in recent Venezuelan election

#406

Post by akdev1l »

culi wrote: post #377
berdario wrote: post #333

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

These are forecasts based on pictures of ballot tallies. And this website is made by the opposition. I'm not saying they're wrong, I just think it's silly to take their word for it instead of just waiting until we have more data and these results have been looked over by independent parties

Those are not “forecasts”. Those are actual counts based on the records they have (80% of all records).

There is no forecasting being done, they simply counted the votes from the voting records.

Re: Suspicious data pattern in recent Venezuelan election

#407

Post by akdev1l »

berdario wrote: post #317
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…

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 escrutini…

The locals probably can’t request shit because those records are in custody of the military.

Many Venezuelan people have verified their records. Including the “witnesses” who have signed all the records. The signatures can be seen on the pictures.

There’s nothing stopping anyone from doing OCR on the images to extract the count and just do the math. (Which is what I am doing but not as easy as it sounds)

Re: Suspicious data pattern in recent Venezuelan election

#408

Post by roenxi »

tptacek wrote: post #362
roenxi wrote: post #349

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 publica…

> 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...

Not necessarily. The Occam's razor scenario if we saw this in a well organised country would be:

30 polling places report "We've counted votes, each candidate has scored ". The NEC works out the overall percent for each candidate appropriately by weighting and sums the votes. Then, stupidly, back-calculates the number of votes for each candidate from those two figures.

That'd be a concerning level of incompetence in an office dedicated to counting votes, but it isn't a huge problem (especially in a provisional number - it isn't exactly wrong as much as needlessly suspicious). Apart from the fact that nobody thought to report raw totals by candidate which should be their first instinct. But it isn't manipulation as much as incompetence. The % would be accurate and the numbers indicative.

Re: Suspicious data pattern in recent Venezuelan election

#409

Post by alonsonic »

ksynwa wrote: post #402

Americans always seem more concerned about Venezuelan elections than Venezuelans are.

Im venezuelan and can assure you there is not a single venezuelan not talking about this 24/7 right now. And yes the international atenttion helps. Democracies are fragile and you should be invested in keeping them alive even outside of the US.
Post reply on HN