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Suspicious data pattern in recent Venezuelan election

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Re: Suspicious data pattern in recent Venezuelan election

#421

Post by notfed »

energy123 wrote: post #350
noobermin wrote: post #291

The point of the article which I missed: the issue here is that the vote totals are very close to their 0.1% place roundings after multiplying the total votes times the percentages, suggesting that the vote totals were simply faked by taking the total votes and multiplying them by percentages precise only to the 0.1% place. I had mistakenly thought the quoted twitter post found it weird that the vote totals had the s…

> the issue here is that the vote totals are very close to their 0.1% place roundings after multiplying the total votes times the percentages That's right, but the conclusion is a bit stronger than just "very close". There was no other integer that could have been closer, which is consistent with them rounding their fraudulent vote count up/down to the nearest integer.

Yeah, "very close" is not the right wording: "EXACTLY" is.

Re: Suspicious data pattern in recent Venezuelan election

#422

Post by shiroiushi »

beaglesss wrote: post #369
manoweb wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There's plenty of historical examples of monarchical governments where the king/queen/emperor was pretty good (or even great), but then died and was succeeded by their shitty son/daughter and things quickly went to hell.

The primary strength of a democratic republic (or a monarchy where the monarch has no power at all and is merely a figurehead, as is the case in many of today's monarchies) is avoiding this scenario. It doesn't guarantee stability, but monarchies are guaranteed to be unstable precisely because children are frequently not like their parents, and those systems don't have a way of removing shitty rulers, so you only get stability as long as the monarch is alive and of sound mind.

Re: Suspicious data pattern in recent Venezuelan election

#423

Post by lucianbr »

worstspotgain wrote: post #162
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?

No, that's a meta-democratic vote, not a democratic vote. Many constitutions disqualify insurgents and revolutionaries from running for office for this reason. At a minimum you'd have to follow the super-majority process for amending the constitution if there is one. In practice, it's no different from having a revolution. Might as well wear the shoe if it fits. Congrats to the generalissimo dictator!

> No, that's a meta-democratic vote, not a democratic vote.

Now whoever decides which votes are democratic and which are meta-democratic is the de-facto ruler of the country, and elections are just a show. Any time you don't like the result - "well, it was meta-democratic you see, and therefore does not count". It's frankly incredible that people put out arguments like this with a straight face.

The only way elections can work is if you actually abide by the result, whatever it is. If you get to reject some of the results, then you might as well not do elections at all, just let us know what results you want.

Re: Suspicious data pattern in recent Venezuelan election

#424

Post by notfed »

Axsuul wrote: post #403
SV_BubbleTime wrote: post #356

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That expense is worth our democracy not getting hacked.

Re: Suspicious data pattern in recent Venezuelan election

#425

Post by aspensmonster »

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…

Long time no see, HN! As a techie-turned-communist I'm vested in this story, so I decided to follow along:

https://x.com/aspensmonster/status/1818859550516129814

I was able to follow their guide to scrape the resultadosconvzla.com website, and ended up with ~22,000 JPGs of receipts. A random sampling of them shows that, for the most part, they contain no actual inked signatures and/or fingerprints that would be present on the receipts signed by the poll workers. Some of the receipts do have signatures and/or fingerprints, but not most of them. Most of them look like this:

https://octodon.social/deck/@aspensmonster/11288491762219446...

I.e., it looks like they asked a voting machine to print out a receipt, and it did. Then, they scanned the receipt in and put it online. The important part though, where individual poll workers scattered across hundreds of stations all over the country all sign their receipts in ink, for comparison against the computerized signatures gathered beforehand, does not appear to have happened for most of the receipts that the opposition has in possession.

I'm frustrated that the Maduro government has released highly improbable numbers. And I'm frustrated that it (certainly appears that) the opposition doesn't have nearly as much validated data as they claim to have. My gut tells me that the CNE got hacked, that the results are thus untrustworthy, and that they'll need to re-run the election, preferably by pen and paper. But the Maduro administration didn't want to face up to that fact and so, made up numbers instead -__-

Re: Suspicious data pattern in recent Venezuelan election

#427

Post by supergirl »

misleading article, pretending this is some kind of scientific evidence of fraud without mentioning other possible explanations.

the most likely and obvious explanation is that there was a mistake in the final report not in the raw data. they just rounded the percentages first and gave them to someone who then made the report with the number of votes based on that.

you can’t really distinguish a mistake from fraud in this case. and then they will fix the mistake and people will say “aha we caught them and now they try to hide it”

Re: Suspicious data pattern in recent Venezuelan election

#428

Post by ksynwa »

alonsonic wrote: post #409
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.

[flagged]

Re: Suspicious data pattern in recent Venezuelan election

#429

Post by zaik »

wrsh07 wrote: post #305
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?

Hard. Naively, run the election, use real vote counts, claim that you're the one that got more. Ok but now we need to fake this on a local level. But everybody knows people in this district are more Party A and in that are more Party B. Well.... let's correct for that... If you want to give top line numbers, fine. Credible local numbers would get really hairy

> Naively, run the election, use real vote counts, claim that you're the one that got more.

I think this would be even more obvious, even to the general public, especially when there is a landslide victory. Oh, your result is 70%? That's exactly what the exit polls said about our candidate.

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