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Suspicious data pattern in recent Venezuelan election

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Re: Suspicious data pattern in recent Venezuelan election

#491

Post by ahmeneeroe-v2 »

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…

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

And voter ID required

Re: Suspicious data pattern in recent Venezuelan election

#492

Post by grumple »

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…

Citing an organization controlled by Maduro to support Maduro's obviously fraudulent vote share is certainly a choice.

I trust the US more than any foreign entity, especially in a nation as transparently corrupt as Venezuela.

Re: Suspicious data pattern in recent Venezuelan election

#493

Post by tptacek »

kelipso wrote: post #486
tptacek wrote: post #381

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm summarizing that PPS in my comment. The exculpatory scenario is: (1) start with real numbers, (2) compute percentages, (3) round percentages, (4) discard original numbers, (5) compute new numbers from the round percentages. Steps (4) and (5) don't have any valid explanation, and few (though maybe some) plausible human error explanations. As long as we're on the same page that nobody ever had any business reportin…

> Steps (4) and (5) don't have any valid explanation, and few (though maybe some) plausible human error explanations. It does... Person A didn't send the original numbers to Person B. And then Person B wanted to publish a document that showed the original numbers anyway (maybe they were asked to by a media person or something). And they did the glaringly obvious calculation of g% x total_votes and called it a day ins…

Person B made up vote counts for the candidates in your scenario. That is not a very common scenario in official elections results reporting, which is what this was.

Re: Suspicious data pattern in recent Venezuelan election

#494

Post by tptacek »

foobarqux wrote: post #471
tptacek wrote: post #400

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not a PR person reading the numbers. It's the President of the CNE!

Who presumably is more of a politician (and therefore PR person) than an analyst (even if they were an analyst some time in the past). I can guarantee Jensen Huang is not vetting each number he repeats, even if he was a skilled engineer in the past.

I have no idea what you're talking about here. The numbers we're talking about were read aloud by the president of the Maduro-controlled Venezuelan election authority.

Re: Suspicious data pattern in recent Venezuelan election

#495

Post by ptero »

dkarl wrote: post #475
ptero wrote: post #346

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't have this feeling. As a single data point, the vast majority of my friends, both democratic and republican, are concerned about the other party pulling some tricks and would welcome as much independent transparency as possible; international observers and anything else. My 2c.

For my data point, the Republicans I know who are concerned about election meddling would consider virtually any foreign country, or the entire international community at large, to be potential conspirators against us. Russia gets a pass as long as Trump vouches for them, but he could turn that on a dime if he wanted.

Interesting. I do not think I personally know a single Republican who would be against international observers at US elections; and we did discuss the topic with a few.

No offense intended, but are you actually going off your friends' explicitly stated opinions or current media memes?

Re: Suspicious data pattern in recent Venezuelan election

#496

Post by mateuspires »

forgetfulness wrote: post #115
nikolay wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not necessarily. If the person announcing was given the number of votes and rounded percentages, then this could explain it. For example, in my country, they always report only turnout as a percentage with a single decimal and the share of each candidate/party with up to 2 decimals, never the number of votes - who cares about the absolute numbers anyway?

The thing is, that the absolute number of votes work out to give the announced percentage with 6 decimal digits, just as if they put "51.2%" on a calculator and worked backwards. The point is that they didn't actually round the percentage, it was actually 51.199999 for the President and 44.199999 for the opposition, the only credible explanation is that they picked the percentages and then cooked the absolute numbers…

Finally some good explanation

Re: Suspicious data pattern in recent Venezuelan election

#497

Post by DonnyV »

rcardo11 wrote: post #113
suzzer99 wrote: post #17

More on this. The Carter Foundation, the only impartial observers who were in Venezuela for the election, and who previously defended Venezuela's election system following Chavez's 2004 win, has called on Maduro's government to release local vote tallies, which apparently it is never going to do: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/31/world/americas/venezuela-...

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.”

List of fake news anti-Maduro posts https://x.com/MyLordBebo/status/1818972331424768091

Re: Suspicious data pattern in recent Venezuelan election

#498

Post by lostlogin »

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?

If have thought it more likely that the stress would cause an accidental subtle error.

Re: Suspicious data pattern in recent Venezuelan election

#499

Post by lostlogin »

stouset wrote: post #417
immibis wrote: post #345

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Statistically, yes they are. Immibis just did.

Re: Suspicious data pattern in recent Venezuelan election

#500

Post by alejohausner »

Here are the true vote totals, as reported by witnesses at the polling booths:

https://resultadosconvzla.com/

It was a landslide for the opposition candidate Gonzalez, 67% to Maduro’s 30%.

Sadly, the mathematical analysis in the OP is no match for the power of state brutality. It’s fun to point out the cheating, but ultimately it reminds me of xkcd 538.

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