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Suspicious data pattern in recent Venezuelan election

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Re: Suspicious data pattern in recent Venezuelan election

#501

Post by tptacek »

agroot12 wrote: post #440
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 are right that it is unlikely that one candidate gets the number of votes that exactly matches a certain percentage with one decimal (1:10.000 as per the source article). But it's even more unlikely and astonishing that the second candidate also gets a number of votes corresponding to a percentage with one decimal! This is highly suspicious if the vote counts are presented as official result. But as mentioned in…

The results we're discussing were read live by the president of the Venezuelan electoral authority. It is possible that they... simply read the wrong results? Like an internal estimate rather than the real numbers? But that is a wild mistake for the electoral authority to make.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41125031

Re: Suspicious data pattern in recent Venezuelan election

#502

Post by culi »

akdev1l wrote: post #406
culi wrote: post #377

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

They have to forecast to make up for records they do not have. Otherwise they can just pick the 80% that are most likely to vote the way they want

Re: Suspicious data pattern in recent Venezuelan election

#503

Post by culi »

akdev1l wrote: post #407
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 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)

You could make a public spreadsheet so others can join in on the crowdsourced effort

Just make a list of every precinct and whether or not we have a screenshot for them. People can help by uploading more pictures and which precinct it corresponds to and also manually reading the results and updating the spreadsheet

Re: Suspicious data pattern in recent Venezuelan election

#504

Post by culi »

lolinder wrote: post #290
culi wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These aren't the vote totals. This is "80%" of the votes. No one has posted a link to the official statement. Votes are still being counted and we won't have the vote totals for a while

You're literally building a voting simulator. There's no way you don't see that getting round percentages reported for "80%" of the votes is just as improbable as getting round percentages reported for 100% of the votes.

My point is it's obvious these numbers are lazily communicated. The official report never included a total votes number. It seems highly likely that somewhere along the way someone worked backwards from the percentages to work out that final number

My point was that obviously "80%" isn't an exact number. So therefore we probably shouldn't trust that any of the other numbers are meant to be read that way

Re: Suspicious data pattern in recent Venezuelan election

#505

Post by [deleted] »

koube wrote: post #4

Forgive me if this is a dumb question, but isn't every vote total extremely unlikely if you make it precise to the exact number of votes? Like the chances of getting n+1, n+2... votes is roughly the same probability. For example the probability of getting [1,2,3,4,5,6] as the winning numbers in the lottery is the same as any random set of numbers.

[deleted]

Re: Suspicious data pattern in recent Venezuelan election

#506

Post by tim333 »

SXX wrote: post #484
tim333 wrote: post #460

It's all nice looking for suspicious patterns but a bit pointless when the election is very obviously rigged (107% of votes counted etc) and Maduro is like I control the army what you going to do about it? The latter is a more interesting question. There must be some way to get vote rigging dictators out?

> There must be some way to get vote rigging dictators out? If only other countries wasn't supplying dictator regimes with money, but it's very hard to do. Especially after EU gave enough money to another dictator to make him into much more dangerous warmonger. So now Venezuela isn't the worst dictatorship and it's will get more money from oil.

I don't know really but the US was able to go arrest Noriega without too much grief and Britain where I live used to take over loads of countries for it's empire before that became politically incorrect. Maybe we could have some modified version limited to support a countries peoples against illegitimate rulers on a kick them out, hold elections then leave basis?

Maybe we could have something like a modified version of the US constitution like: We the People of the world, in Order to establish Justice... reserve the right to kick the bastards out and elect a new bunch, by force if necessary.

Re: Suspicious data pattern in recent Venezuelan election

#507

Post by tptacek »

culi wrote: post #504
lolinder wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're literally building a voting simulator. There's no way you don't see that getting round percentages reported for "80%" of the votes is just as improbable as getting round percentages reported for 100% of the votes.

My point is it's obvious these numbers are lazily communicated. The official report never included a total votes number. It seems highly likely that somewhere along the way someone worked backwards from the percentages to work out that final number My point was that obviously "80%" isn't an exact number. So therefore we probably shouldn't trust that any of the other numbers are meant to be read that way

You keep saying that they didn't include a total votes number. That's false, as was pointed out to you across the thread.

Re: Suspicious data pattern in recent Venezuelan election

#508

Post by bloppe »

adamtaylor_13 wrote: post #476
AnimalMuppet wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By 2024, most people should have figured out that there wasn't legitimacy to this.

Why? What happened in 4 years that revealed to everyone beyond a doubt that it wasn’t legitimate? Where I live, no one questions that the election was rigged. Most believe it was. I haven’t done enough of my own research to know one way or the other.

The key is that every single challenge has been debunked, often in court and often by Republican judges. When every challenge has been debunked, it's time to accept that the vote was fair.

The problem is that it's too easy to hallucinate new challenges. It's easy to claim some guy stuffed ballot boxes with no evidence, and if people want to believe that, they will unless given irrefutable proof to the contrary. But how do you prove irrefutably that Fidel Castro definitely did not stuff all the ballot boxes? Apparently, you can't.

Re: Suspicious data pattern in recent Venezuelan election

#509

Post by bloppe »

GolberThorce wrote: post #318
notjoemama wrote: post #84

I recall having read about elections in Africa and the troubles they faced. I can't find it now, but there was one particular website offering a very detailed but rigorous approach to determining the legitimacy of elections. I'll offer this article from the BBC as a stand in for the criteria (from 2016): https://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-37243190 Vote rigging: How to spot the tell-tale signs 1. Too many voters 2.…

This criteria is erroneous as the 2020 US election proved. The UN updated its Election Observation standards, and Venezuela's election mostly passes them.

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 crucial difference in the US is that each party sounds poll watchers to every single polling station to watch people count the results.

Would be very interested to know if there are any serious claims that any of these other criteria were violated

Re: Suspicious data pattern in recent Venezuelan election

#510

Post by bloppe »

adamtaylor_13 wrote: post #226
knowaveragejoe wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We're still clinging to this in 2024? Wow.

Suppose there was legitimacy to this, which many believe, why wouldn’t we still talk about this in 2024? Are we not allowed to discuss history?

It's a bit like discussing whether God exists. Ya lots of people believe it and you can certainly talk about it. But this isn't really a forum for that kind of conversation.
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