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Suspicious data pattern in recent Venezuelan election

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Re: Suspicious data pattern in recent Venezuelan election

#521

Post by Log_out_ »

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…

You can also encode little ascii messages onto the fraction. 60,7097107101 % is the worlds smallest whistle

Re: Suspicious data pattern in recent Venezuelan election

#522

Post by counterpointus »

aspensmonster wrote: post #425
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…

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 prese…

As is explained in detail here: https://x.com/i/broadcasts/1YpKklRpzAyGj The signatures on the Actas are digital, not ink. The testigos sign on the voting machine's screen. The machine will print out the receipt once the witnesses agree to the electronic count against their tallies of the individual paper votes. After printing, the machine goes online to transmit the electronic results, which can always be audited by the physical results.

What's more likely, that the opposition forged tens of thousands of receipts in less than a day, or a dictator reported fake results to remain in power? Receipts, mind you, copies of which are given to each witness from the top-three political parties, at any point now could have been called into question but not a single counter example has been shown.

Please don't drink their "North Macedonia" hack kool-aid.

Re: Suspicious data pattern in recent Venezuelan election

#523

Post by jose_zap »

advisedwang wrote: post #514
alejohausner wrote: post #500

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.

How do the witnesses know how people voted? I can't find sources saying whether Venezuela has as secret ballot or not, but I assume so otherwise it would be all over the news

Witnesses representing political parties are entitled by law to a copy of the tally before the machine sends its results to a central server.

Each copy must be signed by all witnesses and also contains a digitally-signed hash of the tally at the bottom of the receipt.

Re: Suspicious data pattern in recent Venezuelan election

#524

Post by berdario »

jose_zap wrote: post #467
berdario wrote: post #317

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 images can be corroborated by the random string that is printed at the bottom. It’s a digitally signed hash of the tally for that machine. Political parties have access to the signing key and can verify that the signature matches.

Do you have any details about the kind of mechanism that they used?

If it's a private/public kind of mechanism, they should be able to disclose the public key for signature verification.

If it's not, and it's some kind of a HMAC, and the political parties have all access to the key... Then this doesn't protect at all against the threat implied (the different parties don't trust each other, and both claim that they are trying to "steal" the election), since these signatures could be forged by any of the political parties with access to the key

Even in the former case, it could be possible that a machine could be compromised, and could have emitted two tallies (one for the actual election, and another one with different numbers and forged signatures). In that case, we would still want to check that the local polling station can confirm that the Acta that we're seeing is congruent with what they have

Re: Suspicious data pattern in recent Venezuelan election

#525

Post by mihaaly »

user3939382 wrote: post #479
mihaaly wrote: post #453

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course you didn't say that, that was an irony you silly, you just do not understand math and draw out sensless mass manipulation bollocks from your desperation hat as a consequence. Not understanding the obvious.

> you just do not understand math Based on what?

Based on your interpretation of the situation.

Re: Suspicious data pattern in recent Venezuelan election

#526

Post by jose_zap »

berdario wrote: post #524
jose_zap wrote: post #467

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The images can be corroborated by the random string that is printed at the bottom. It’s a digitally signed hash of the tally for that machine. Political parties have access to the signing key and can verify that the signature matches.

Do you have any details about the kind of mechanism that they used? If it's a private/public kind of mechanism, they should be able to disclose the public key for signature verification. If it's not, and it's some kind of a HMAC, and the political parties have all access to the key... Then this doesn't protect at all against the threat implied (the different parties don't trust each other, and both claim that they ar…

Here’s a FAQ about the security features of the voting machines https://www.smartmatic.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/FAQ_Cy...

I also agree the parties should disclose the public key and the parameters to calculate the hash.

The code and the keys are stored in a database that is audited by political parties before the election. What I’m not certain about is whether they have access to it at this time.

Proving the validity of the acts should be trivial, especially for any party who had access to the audited database. There is little point in forging fake ones.

Re: Suspicious data pattern in recent Venezuelan election

#527

Post by gonational »

I love trying to imagine what it's like being inside the mind of somebody who can entertain this kind of material (assumptions based on statistics, alone), while simultaneously believing that the 2020 US presidential election was sound and secure.

I also love imagining what it must be like to read a comment like this and thinks it's political in nature.

Those were simpler times...

Re: Suspicious data pattern in recent Venezuelan election

#528

Post by shufflerofrocks »

alephnerd wrote: post #63
consumer451 wrote: post #33

This is a bit of an aside, but as a geopolitical news junkie, what I keep searching on Google News is: Venezuela election Lula How his government reacts is going to be a major factor. Given Lula's past dedication to Chavezism, his post-election reaction has made me hopeful for change in Venezuela. What is directly related to TFA is that both the USA and Brazil want to see the voting data. https://www.reuters.com/worl…

> Given Lula's past dedication to (sic) Chavezism Brazil has quasi-presidential system, but it's Chamber of Deputies has the actual power. In the 2000s, Lula's PT was the largest party (usually around 20-25% of the total seats) and could as such strongarm smaller leftist parties into a governing coalition with an absolute majority. Lula won the presidential election in 2022, but his party PT was the 3rd largest, and…

>Also, IGNORE anything on Twitter, Reddit, or HN (ironic ik). The lesswrong/credibledefense/zeihan types are all idiots ime. Using an "objective" tone doesn't make rubbish "objective"

Not to mention these sites are FILLED to the brim with bots. Eg. In 2013, the most "reddit-addicted" area was Eglin Air Force Base in Florida, with largest amount of activity [0]. Eglin was one of the few places used in a study for testing social media manipulation by Pentagon [1]

And not to mention the Russian/Chinese/Indian bots

[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/Blackout2015/comments/4ylml3/reddit...

[1] http://arxiv.org/pdf/1402.5644

Re: Suspicious data pattern in recent Venezuelan election

#529

Post by acureau »

gonational wrote: post #527

I love trying to imagine what it's like being inside the mind of somebody who can entertain this kind of material (assumptions based on statistics, alone), while simultaneously believing that the 2020 US presidential election was sound and secure. I also love imagining what it must be like to read a comment like this and thinks it's political in nature. Those were simpler times...

It's disingenuous to say discussion about election fraud isn't political in nature, what else could it be? I dismissed the 2020 US election fraud claims without looking into them, but I've seen it brought up a few times in this thread and people on HN usually hold reasonable views. After some research I've found nothing remotely convincing.

Could you point me towards something like the data presented in this article? That's not to say that this is definitive evidence, but it's an order of magnitude more convincing than anything I've found about the 2020 US election.

Re: Suspicious data pattern in recent Venezuelan election

#530

Post by bloppe »

GolberThorce wrote: post #513
bloppe wrote: post #509

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which criterion specifically was violated during that election? A lot of people seem to think there was a delay in reporting results, but there's a differences between a reporting delay and a counting delay. Most districts report counts incrementally, so if it's taking a long time to open thousands of envelopes, and it's a close race, you get incremental updates, but no final verdict until enough are counted. Also, a…

"so if it's taking a long time to open thousands of envelopes, and it's a close race, you get incremental updates, but no final verdict until enough are counted." Exactly. The criterion is delay in announcing results, but the election was legitimate so there's an issue with the criterion. "there's a differences between a reporting delay and a counting delay." not relevant to the standard

I would say there's a very meaningful difference between "they're still counting the results, and releasing incremental counts, and all is being watched by poll watchers" vs. "we've finished counting, but we're not releasing the results for a while, and nobody is monitoring the process". The former sounds great. The latter sounds very suspicious.

Maybe it's just an issue in how the standards are interpreted by some people.

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