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

411–420 of 536 posts

Re: Suspicious data pattern in recent Venezuelan election

#411

Post by tptacek »

roenxi wrote: post #408
tptacek wrote: post #362

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 we…

Just so we're clear that at this point in the conversation I'm not all that wedded to any specific scenario, but:

Can you say more about why the CNE would back-calculate the raw vote counts for each candidate? Why would you even have that column in your spreadsheet? Keep in mind, you needed to keep the original raw counts around to compute percentages to begin with.

Re: Suspicious data pattern in recent Venezuelan election

#412

Post by nick238 »

IAmGraydon wrote: post #309
aaplok wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In light of recent analyses of suspicious elections (Iran, Russia, Venezuela), it seems harder than it sounds to avoid discernible patterns. On the other hand, the goal is to get away with fraud, not to convince an international community who will likely look for any confirmation of their suspicion. It would be interesting to look for patterns in a (presumably) fair election like the recent British one for comparison…

>It would be interesting to look for patterns in a (presumably) fair election like the recent British one for comparison. Someone should run this same analysis on all the election data they can get their hands on. Who knows what might be found.

There were some pretty shit analysises of the 2020 US elections that Matt Parker covered with videos like "Why do Biden's votes not follow Benford's law?"[1] and "Why was Biden's win calculated to be 1 in 1,000,000,000,000,000?"[2].

I don't know about other countries, but the amount of data that every county in every US state produces makes systematic fraud pretty much impossible. If there's literally only 3 numbers produced by the Venezuelan government, you need to be seriously incompetent to have detectable fraud because techniques like Benford's or Zipf's law need lots of individual numbers.

[1]: https://youtu.be/etx0k1nLn78

[2]: https://youtu.be/ua5aOFi-DKs

Re: Suspicious data pattern in recent Venezuelan election

#413

Post by pydry »

grumple wrote: post #206
avsteele wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The National Lawyers Guild twitter profile reads: "Human rights over property interests since 1937. Fighting for liberation, organizing in solidarity with radical movement leaders." https://x.com/NLGnews They are certainly not impartial.

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/…

[flagged]

Re: Suspicious data pattern in recent Venezuelan election

#414

Post by osigurdson »

mplewis wrote: post #231
osigurdson wrote: post #166

I think we are going to have to give up anonymity in the name of democracy. Unless you can confirm that your vote has been correctly counted, how can you ever be certain what they have done with it?

Can you think of any problems that would arise from non-anonymous voting?

Of course, there is the whole concept of forced votes, etc. But it seems unlikely that this could be simultaneously widespread and clandestine. Everything is a tradeoff.

Re: Suspicious data pattern in recent Venezuelan election

#415

Post by pydry »

destring wrote: post #176
culi wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

As a Venezuelan it baffles me how there can be people trying to support a regime that is only recognized by other authoritarian regimes. A regime with clear violations of Human Rights. Hinterlaces is government funded. There were many exit polls that showed the 60/40 split in favor of opposition. Even if you ignore those we are in an age when you can clearly see the government violently repressing and kidnapping as t…

[flagged]

Re: Suspicious data pattern in recent Venezuelan election

#417

Post by stouset »

immibis wrote: post #345
stouset wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

The Biden election in 2020 also failed Benford's law - unless you're suggesting that one was fake, it seems that failing Benford's law is okay.

Nobody is saying that failing a statistical test is by itself indicative of anything.

Re: Suspicious data pattern in recent Venezuelan election

#418

Post by firekvz »

culi wrote: post #246

No one has yet to post the actual official statement by the CNE. It doesn't seem too unlikely that they had a total vote count as well as the percentages for each candidate and released those. It feels like people are jumping to some major conclusions in this thread

cause they did not release any official statement, they only read those numbers on national TV and 8 hours later they made maduro sign the papers as a winners.

now, more than 72 hours after elections, we still dont know the results and there is not a single place to check the acts or the numbers by pooling center.

it was all fraud.

Re: Suspicious data pattern in recent Venezuelan election

#419

Post by roenxi »

tptacek wrote: post #411
roenxi wrote: post #408

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 we…

Just so we're clear that at this point in the conversation I'm not all that wedded to any specific scenario, but: Can you say more about why the CNE would back-calculate the raw vote counts for each candidate? Why would you even have that column in your spreadsheet? Keep in mind, you needed to keep the original raw counts around to compute percentages to begin with.

> Can you say more about why the CNE would back-calculate the raw vote counts for each candidate?

I can't see a reason why they would do that - but the world is large and maybe there is. It is clear someone has done something stupid here, so we've ruled out a highly competent electoral office.

So if I go with a creative scenario - some new grad gets the job of aggregating the provisional stats because how can they get that wrong. They have a template for the final vote, but only summary data provided by the polling stations. They have a teachable moment and realise that they can fill out the final template with what they have based on a few calculations. That gets reported officially without anyone senior asking where the vote totals came from.

Or it could be fraud. Also an easy option.

Re: Suspicious data pattern in recent Venezuelan election

#420

Post by fshbbdssbbgdd »

m0dest wrote: post #391
aaplok wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In light of recent analyses of suspicious elections (Iran, Russia, Venezuela), it seems harder than it sounds to avoid discernible patterns. On the other hand, the goal is to get away with fraud, not to convince an international community who will likely look for any confirmation of their suspicion. It would be interesting to look for patterns in a (presumably) fair election like the recent British one for comparison…

If you were forced against your will to aid in this type of fraud, might you not intentionally include a subtle error in your work that reveals its illegitimacy to a careful observer?

Gun to my head? No.
Post reply on HN