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-...
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 get 10,058,774 votes. What are the odds that the % of votes you get is a round number like 60%, or 51.2%? They're infinitesimally small. You're much more likely to get ugly numbers, like 59.941323854% of the vote, unless you choose some artificial percentage and work backward.
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?
Not difficult at all. Just pick the approximate numbers you want and then introduce a random error of a few percent. (Normal, uniform, doesn't really matter). This is also not hard for statistics experts to detect, but it's much harder to prove (aka you've got plausible deniability).
One wonders why they didn't even bother to do fraud slightly better.
Unless done carefully this will almost certainly fail Benford’s Law.
Manipulating statistics is harder than you think.
It's my understanding that legitimate vote totals aren't likely to conform to Benford's law in the first place.
Even if that's the case, though, there might very well be other applicable tests this would run afoul of.
I’m not a statistician so I may be confusing it with Zipf’s law. But IIRC tallies from individual precincts should roughly conform to Benford’s law.
I think the concern is that precinct size tends to cluster in ways that mean results can cluster in ways that - for a large portion of the data - does not span a full order of magnitude.
To elaborate, if we imagine a polity with precincts that turn out 10,000 people each election, with two major party candidates that each get between 20% and 80% of the vote, we'd see precisely 0% precincts with a leading digit of 1, much less the ~30% predicted by Benford's law. Of course that doesn't exactly describe any real polity, but it doesn't seem surprising that real elections would be enough like that to screw with the pattern.
Precints have roughly even populations and therefore typically don't conform to Benford's law. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=etx0k1nLn78&t=76s&pp=ygUQYmV...
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.
There was a good paper in an American Statistical Association journal about this.
https://chance.amstat.org/2022/04/benfords-law-votes/
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/09332480.2022.20...
Unless done carefully this will almost certainly fail Benford’s Law.
IIRC Benford's law relies upon things that have power-law underpinnings, such as iterated growth% at different rates. In contrast, relative vote amounts at a given point in time don't have many ways to exhibit that, particularly when the total number of voters is fixed rather than having voters divide like bacteria during polling day.
However it might work if you were checking the growth in total eligible voters in different locations over time.
I like to imagine Benford's Law a bit like throwing randomly distributed darts through the air at a paper target, exept the target is graph paper with log-10 subdivisions. The "leading 1" zones are simply bigger targets. [0]
[0] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Logarithmic_scale.sv...
But votes aren’t tallied in one location, districts individually tally.
So now you’ve got to force each of those districts to change the numbers.
If they can get away with being balatant, that is even more of a show of power.
Think of it this way - who has more power in a relationship? The one who is really good at cheating and hiding it? Or the the one who doesn’t even try to hide it, but suffers no consequences?
Just look at how many comments are trying to figure out how the numbers could be legitimate, and how unlikely it is that Maduro is going to actually be removed from power.
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.
Disclaimer: I have never tried to rig elections myself so I don't really know how hard it is.
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?
E. Goldstein wins with 51.2HELPIMTRAPPEDINANELECTIONRIGGINGBUNKER% of the vote!
One would have to take care with the analysis because humans are actually trapped in vote counting bunkers (or local sports halls more likely) in legitimate elections. Any analysis that simply concludes votes were subject to the foibles of hand counting wouldn’t be very useful.
Gun to my head? No.
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.
Despite my joke in a sibling comment, this is key. When you're a politician everything is power relations. Sometimes it's necessary to show that you have the power to semi-obviously rig an election. Your bargaining position is different if it requires military force to remove you vs just an unhappy electorate. You can achieve different things.
Yup. It’s a special kind of power that can flat out rig an election and have opponents ‘fall out of windows’ with no repercussions.
The type no one wants to even be seen trying to challenge.
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.
This kind of mistake is easy to avoid. The problem is that there are a lot of potential mistakes that could be made, this is just one of them.
And the people doing the fraud aren't going to be computer scientists or statisticians. They were chosen for their loyalty to the dear leader.
The dear leader wasn't chosen for his ability, either, but for his loyalty to the previous dear leader.
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.
It's not hard for you or me.
But for the brutal thugs running Venezuela, it is a very advanced conept.
it's like Russia killing someone with polonium. Hitting 60% exactly sends a message to anyone with the bright idea of running against the brutal thug's preferred candidate that it might not be a good idea, because there are brutal thugs involved.
Depends on if you're in on it with the forgers or if you're against it but being forced to do it. It's the perfect clue to leave in, as its intention is plausibly deniable and you can tip statisticians to uncover the fraud.
I don't know, but the numbers they provided here are impossible.
Generate 10,058,744 random floating numbers from [0,1), and count how many will fall into each of the intervals: [0, 0.522), [0.522, 0.522+0.442), or [0.522+0.442, 1). You can do it with less calculations if you know how to generate random numbers from binomial distribution. Then you should calculate percentages from these three numbers just to be sure they are right.
It is not difficult at all, but it needs some basic programming skills and some basic knowledge of statistics.
Votes are not random.
So it would be non-trivial to make results look real.
Additionally, if even a few polling places release real data - that can really complicate things.
It will look very, very suspicious when some polling places display wildly different behaviors (especially if they match expectations) then the rest of the polling places.
Actually think this is a fascinating question, although perhaps for different reasons within whatever reasons might have led you to ask it.
I think you raise a legitimate point that it's not that hard to create ugly numbers.
I also think that authoritarian social dynamics come to these questions with a kind of brutal simplicity, lack of intellectual curiosity or creativity, and a lot of the traits that would entail a value for democracy are mutually exclusive with the brute simplicity of authoritarian mindset. And so the story they choose to tell of how they won is going to have similar hallmarks of brute simplicity and absence of nuance.
Use the real numbers but change the owners of each count.
Except, of course, if the winning party has a huge advantage which you don't think people would buy.
You just need to run some Monte Carlo sims where the priors are your desired rates, then use this results to alter the real numbers. It's as random as it gets.
No you see, they had the perfect plan.
But they got foiled by that one thing they always forget at every single election (that never gets brought up when your government agrees with the result, because in that case it's just a "statistical anomaly" or "shit happens sometimes")
What's wrong with announcing results with rounded percentages?!
Nothing. The problem is when you obviously picked the rounded percentages that sounded good first and then calculated the number of votes from that.
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 to line up, so the numbers look "ugly", but the percentages are neat.
As they say in the article one explanation is the guy publishing the numbers was not given the actual counts only the percentages and imputed the counts on his own.
That's fishy in its own right. The absolute vote tallies are the key thing in a democratic election. The percentages are a derived value to quickly make sense of the vote tallies, but the vote tallies are the actual results. Why would you need to derive vote tallies from percentages when you derived the percentages from the tallies?
It'd be like feeding your English marketing copy into Google translate to Spanish and back and using that instead of the original copy.
Because voting results are universally reported as percentages, that's what everyone uses and understands.
Reporting just the percentages makes sense. Reporting rounded versions of those percentages not only makes sense, but is the universal idiom for reporting percentages. But reporting synthesized vote counts from the percentages --- even from non-rounded percentages --- is not normal.
People on this thread are hung up on the reported percentages, but those don't matter in this analysis at all. They're not the problem. The problem is the counts themselves. Discard the reported percentages entirely; exact same critique, one statistics students would spot instantly.
Maybe I don't understand what you have identified as the problem. My understanding of the article is that the raw tallies should not correspond to "precise" rounded percentages. The article in an addendum points out one way that could legitimately occur (some underling has the totals and rounded percentages but needs the raw tallies and naively multiplies to get them).
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 reporting the numbers in step (5) --- they're completely fictitious! --- I don't have much to argue about here. The politics aren't interesting to me.
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 instead of being delayed for hours or days waiting for a request for the original numbers. This is really a very common scenario that happens everywhere in multiple fields.
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.
No, they are universally reported in raw numbers accompanied by percentages, as indeed they were here. The raw numbers are universally understood to be derived from the percentages and not vice versa. The votes are the ground truth.
That's how elections always work. The votes are what counts, the percentages are an abstraction to make the votes easier to parse. Any government agency that doesn't operate that way doesn't understand democracy, even if they weren't committing outright fraud.
First these were intermediate results. Second virtually no one reads or understands raw tallies, I don't know anyone who would or could quote them in any election. The final result, the result that is published as a headline in the newspaper are the rounded percentages.
No one is saying that the percentages are not derived from the raw tallies they are saying that it might be that somewhere in the game of telephone to the person that goes on TV and reports only the percentages were communicated and they realized they should put the tallies in too so they imputed them from the numbers they had, the total votes cast and the percentages (and naively it seems obviously okay to do that).
Virtually no one reads or understands raw tallies...
I believe virtually anyone could look at the raw tallies and see which is the largest, and that a majority could calculate the percentages by themselves, if they were so inclined. This was direct election plurality voting, not some sort of proportional voting scheme, and even if it were, having the raw tallies in the public domain is essential to transparency, verification and legitimacy.
it might be that somewhere in the game of telephone to the person that goes on TV and reports only the percentages were communicated and they realized they should put the tallies in too so they imputed them from the numbers they had
And I'm telling you that anyone who handles votes this way doesn't understand democracy. The best case scenario here is that the Venezuelan government doesn't really care about the vote tally (which is, again, bad, because the votes are the thing). The worst case is that they fabricated it entirely. Neither one speaks well for the state of democracy in Venezuela.
Finally some good explanation
That's a really bad thing and a reason not to trust the entire system.
They should report the absolute number of votes at each counting station.
I am talking about publicizing on media - the raw data of Bulgarian elections is available for download in real time during the counting and afterward [0], including the scanned protocols of each polling station and the video recording, which is now required. Even if the voting is electronic in particular (well, most) stations, there's still a paper protocol signed by the members of the section's committee.
A tweet, an article, or a chart on TV doesn't prove anything, as they are not official documents.
Well, nobody else is talking about the headline numbers. That was the miscommunication.
But they did report the absolute number of votes.
Where? In a tweet?
A possibility, but not a good one. Depending on your goal, you either care a _lot_ about the raw number (in which case doing that calculation is _insane_), or you don't care really at all (so...why would you calculate it?).
The didn’t announce the percentages, they announced the vote counts.
Why is that article not pointing to the source? I've looked for it, and I couldn't find it.
I don't see the total number of votes/ballots. Is the vote in Venezuela 100% electronic? If not, there might be invalid paper ballots, too.
They are read aloud by the presenter in Spanish (both total votes and percentages). You can also see them in the tweet if you don't speak Spanish. The announcer appears to represent the national electoral council (Consejo Nacional Electoral), so it's unlikely that he didn't have access to the exact counts (and had to compute them from percentages).
It's...rarely to never done? The exact counts are nearly always provided by voting officials.
The press might summarize an election in whole numbers and maybe round up, but...that's very different from voting officials doing it.
Thanks. Note to self: Next time I want to rig election results, generate a random integer between 54.2% and 54.3% of the vote and count it as the winner's vote, subtract from total pool, wash rinse repeat.
It's remarkable that they don't do this.
The sheer incompetence of the Maduro government and other governments that rig election results is surprising.
So there are 2 things that may not make this no longer so surprising.
1) The Maduro government is more like a large gang that is holding a population hostage, than a government.
All major businesses/imports/exports are owned by people connected to the Maduro regime. They are extorting remissions out of the population because they're the only ones who can import products. The government is so incompetent, it no longer has sufficient machinery or brains to operate their petroleum extractors, so instead they've pursued the more lucrative method of drug smuggling.
The upper echelons of military are in on it and are all very individually wealthy, the lower echelons are brainwashed, but still well compensated for a "government" employee in Venezuela. Think $100 month vs $3 a month.
This "government" will never give this up. They make too much money, and they have bought out the military. They can't just peacefully go away, or they will be tried for their crimes in any major nation. Almost every country has placed sanctions on various high level individuals from the government and frozen all of their assets.
2) There are no intellects in this government. The socialists that fought violently in the 90s that had little/no education rose up the ranks and are now extravagantly rich and powerful.
Imagine if you took a bus driver and made him the dictator of a country. That is exactly what happened, Maduro was literally a bus driver.
This is not to disparage bus drivers, they're fine people, but countries should be ran by experts. Economists, politicians, lawyers, people with some form of education.
They don't understand economics. They don't understand engineering. Almost all of the intellectual work of the country is outsourced to Chinese or Russians.
The entire country is being held hostage by people who have about a 3rd grade education, and that's being generous. But it's because they have guns, and money. But mostly the guns.
Why didn't they outsource the election count rigging to Russian or Chinese?
Because they didn't know they would need help?
Because the Russians (don't know about China) also don't try to hide it.
Not hiding your election fraud isn't always a sign of incompetence; it's also a show of power over the people these dictatorships are oppressing. In Russia, the election is blatantly forged[0]. The goal here isn't just to validate the dictatorship it's to dare you to speak up against it so the nice men with guns can knock on your door and tell you to knock it off, whether that's nicely or less nicely.
[0]: https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2021/10/11/russian-...
Knock it off why? The electorate doesn’t care, it will never get to tv or average feed or even have effect on an average person who barely understands the graph. Everyone knows it’s rigged. This “power show” argument copes with dumb reality more than anything else, it is a HNer idea of how to be a dictator. Power doesn’t need to show itself in such an intricate way, as if it was hiding. It’s right in your face all the time.
That would significantly weaken whatever negotiating position they have with either country.
Have you ever heard a politician speak? Not surprising at all.
You’re much more intelligent than any of the people that control your life, especially so in a dictatorship. That’s a pill hard to swallow, but ideas itt aren’t even remotely a concern for them. They are idiots with a microphone who excel at being at power, that’s it. Everything else gets done by lower and lower ranks with higher and higher competence. Since election rigging isn’t an industry, you can’t expect it to be any smart. It’s not even that “only 1% who understands will be unconvinced, so why care”. They simply aren’t aware of this because it works without it.
Well, yes, but I think you are vastly overestimating the percentage of the population that would even think of this. Countries like Venezuela have a major problem with brain drain as it is. There's very little chance they would think to get a competent statistician involved in rigging their election. They're just simple numbers, right? You don't know what you don't know.
My favourite part of my math education, solutions were always nice.
Compute the eigenvalues of a random-looking (but still integers) 4x4 matrix? Oh, it's sqrt(2), I probably didn't make an error in the calculation.
Then came the advanced physics / mechanics exam. It threw a wrench into our beautiful system. The results were just about anything, incredibly ugly, like the real world :yuck: :vomit:
Oh, it's sqrt(2), I probably didn't make an error in the calculation
You remind me of my university maths exam. In all the past papers, the eigenvalues came out to be round numbers. But in the real paper I sat, no matter how many times I tried to find my mistake, they didn't. I wasted hours of the exam on that.
It was the professor's final year before his retirement.
The year that I took AP Physics, every single piece of study material and practice test exercised only really simple math - small numbers, everything cleanly worked out into integers, etc etc. I did almost everything in my head or with quick notes on paper. This pattern was so consistent I almost didn't bring my calculator into the actual exam because I hadn't needed it all year, and grabbed it only at the last second "just in case".
Turns out that was not a design goal of the real exam and basically nothing worked out to neat, small integer solutions - I probably would have hard failed without the calculator. I'm still sort of confused why prep materials and the real exam diverged so much.
I had a university exam where my calculator literally didn't work. I put a note on the paper to that effect and worked out as far as I could by hand without actually giving any of the final answers. Given the test was about knowledge and not the precise answers, I don't think it harmed me any (my grade was over 80%).
I passed my physics classes refusing to evaluate the final expressions, after all that's what calculators and computers are for. I don't feel that had a huge impact on my grades either and my sanity/stubbornness went unharmed.
Except in the real world we are allowed to offload the computation to a computer and have more time to double check things. Nice solutions are necessary due to time and resource constraints that exist within an educational setting.
Tests should have checksums built into the correct answers.
It's called "digit tests" and it was further theorized that the last digit had a particularly even distribution in natural, honest elections.
Further research showed that last digit test wasn't very good - there are multiple obvious counters to the test.
This isn't a digit test, though—the giveaway here isn't a problem with the last digit (or any single digit), the giveaway is that the vote tallies reported exactly match what you would arrive at if you attempted to derive them from nice round 3-digit percentages.
This is not correct since you can claim the above for any number of votes actually obtained (if you asked someone to pick a number from 1 to 10 million, any number the person picks (assuming iid picks) will be by definition 10^-7).
The problem is more subtle.
There are around 10,000 integers n such that n/10058774 when rounded to 3 decimal places gives 0.512. Of those 10,000 this particular one has the smallest rounding error. That's what gives one the sense that probably they started with the clean fraction 0.512 and then worked their way to the tally.
The odds are, that if you go looking for any one of multiple low-probability events, one of them will be found to have happened.
When I try to explain the issue, it boils down to this : the results look like they have been cooked. And the probability of that hapening by chance is 1 in 100 million.
Mathematically, if votes are random, with 10,058,774 voters you have 10,058,774^2 ~= 1e14 possibilities of different results for 3 candidates (Maduro, Gonzalez and "Other"). On the other hand, the number of possible results that land exactly on the closest integer to be a round 0.1 percentage point is 1000^2 = 1e6. So the probability of the actual votes landing on a round 0.1 percentage point purely by chance is 1000^2/10,058,774^2 ~= 1 in 100 million.
Of course the votes are not entirely random, but they have a random element, so it gives a rough idea of the reality.
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 comments, we cannot be sure that someone was given the total vote count, and the percentages rounded to one decimal, and thought it would be helpful to recalculate how many votes each candidate must have gotten.
To play the devil's advocate: It's possible that the person making the announcement was only given the rounded percentages and the total number of votes, and then "created" the number of votes per candidate to fit to the format of the announcement. That would be sloppy, but not malicious.
Unlikely, the person making the announcement was an official from the national electoral council (Consejo Nacional Electoral). There's no reason the national electoral council wouldn't have access to the exact counts and would have to work their way backwards from percentages.
Yes but that guy certainly didn't tally the votes himself, someone gave him the numbers (and someone else gave him those numbers). It's plausible that in some step only the (rounded) percentages and overall total were given and then someone downstream imputed the counts.
It's possible but not very plausible. Why would the official organization charged with overseeing the elections knowingly report inaccurate numbers when it has access to the accurate numbers?
Because maybe they didn't have direct access to the original numbers? You can't understand that some consumer of the data might not get the original CSV only some summary?
A summary that includes the exact number of votes cast and the percent for each candidate but not the breakdown by candidate?
Why would someone go out of their way to construct a CSV that has the tally by candidate removed* but still has the total vote count? What would that CSV even look like?
* Yes, the tally would have to be removed, because presumably there's a spreadsheet somewhere that was used to generate percentages from tallies.
Yes, the percentages are the most important number, the number everyone is interested in. The next most important number is the voter turnout. You can verify this by looking at the newspaper headlines of any election. Again unless you are an electioneer no one cares about the raw numbers so it would not be surprising that only the percentages and total are communicated to the public relations department.
I don't understand your comments about the CSV: I'm saying that the raw CSV is not being distributed, only the summary statistics.
Yes, the percentages are the most important number, the number everyone is interested in.
Then why did the hypothetical sub-sub-librarian who put together the final spreadsheet feel the need to go back and repopulate those numbers? Clearly they thought people would want to see them, right?
The next most important number is the voter turnout. You can verify this by looking at the newspaper headlines of any election.
So, in this hypothetical, when the tallies per candidate are expressed as percentages it's because percentages are the natural way to think about these things, but when voter turnout is expressed in raw numbers that's because raw numbers are the natural way to think about voter turnout?
Voter turnout is the only number in the set that I could possibly see making sense to express only as a percentage!
My recollection is that turnout is usually quoted in both percentage and absolute numbers but quoting it as a percentage requires external data (population demographics) which presumably isn't in the electioneering department.
Why do you have such a hard time believing that election results (e.g. for a union, for school president etc) might be communicated like "55 to 45, 3000 people voted"?
Because I've literally never seen percentages without tallies reported in any context. It's apparently so uncommon that your hypothetical person who created these clearly-not-real numbers felt the need to go backfill them.
Explain that. If it's so unnecessary to report the tallies and people only want to hear the percentages, why did your hypothetical person go back and backfill them?
Pretty much every headline number does not show tallies (it's impossible to fit in a headline in any case). It's often included in a more detailed analysis further in an article or segment which the vast majority of people don't read. My point is that they are obviously far less important numbers and not the "headline" numbers. So one person (the supplier) could easily have decided (or misunderstood that) the detailed numbers were not required and another person (the consumer) decided that they needed or wanted them because they are conventionally or should be reported.
Remember too that this was not the final completed tally so someone may not have supplied detailed results for intermediate reporting.
If you've ever worked at a big organization it really isn't hard to understand that the left hand doesn't always know what the right hand is doing.
It is inconceivable to me that in a competently-run real election, you would not transfer actual vote tallies at any point in the (internal) process. This is true for intermediate results just like it is true for final results. If percentages are calculated at all, it is to gain insight into your local results.
(I volunteer at a polling station. We count the votes, and submit the raw counts to the next level. Then, we might do a quick calculation of the percentages, just to see how our voting district did. I can also go to my municipality's website and see the results of my polling station, and for the entire municipality. There are absolute numbers, which are reported to the next level, and the website also shows percentages, again, to gain insight into the municipality's results. Even if partial results are reported to the next level, this absolutely happens in the form of "these districts with this number of eligible voters have been counted; these are the absolute numbers".)
Everybody in the chain of responsibility should understand that the absolute numbers are what counts. And even if some people don't, the system must be set up in a way where you cannot transfer anything else. If there is even a serious possibility that someone might re-create voter counts from percentages, your system is a failure, and here it seems to have happened at the highest level.
It's technically possible that that was not their weed and their meth in their pants because those were not their pants. However when they have a mile-long rap sheet for selling drugs, it weakens their argument a bit.
What's the mile long rap sheet though? The group that's alleging fraud (AltaVista) is using images of printed receipts from different voting places as a sample to estimate the final vote. That group also said it's same technique resulted in election outcomes that are within 2 points or less of the announced outcome for 2021, 2018, and 2015.
This seems like a new and unique accusation for Venezuela
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/31/world/americas/venezuela-...
It seems Maduro was way behind in the polls.
https://www.as-coa.org/articles/poll-tracker-venezuelas-2024...
Depends which polls you're looking at. So far, no non-US-linked pollsters have shown Maduro behind (that is, behind the US backed opposition candidate). If you look at something like Hinterlaces you get a very different picture
According to this Venezuelan news article[0], several did:
Well-known pollsters in the Venezuelan political sphere, such as Datanálisis, Datincorp, Delphos, and Consultores 21, along with the emerging Poder y Estrategia, indicated that Urrutia had more than 50% of voting intentions.
[0] https://www.lapatilla.com/2024/07/15/la-guerra-de-encuestas-...
Thanks for the article. I had to translate as my Spanish isn't very good. These seem to be the main points
Surveys of career-marking firms in the Venezuelan political environment, such as Datanalisis, Datincorp, Delphos and Consultores 21, as well as the incipient Power and Strategy, by political scientist Ricardo Ríos, claim that the postulate of anti-chavismo accumulates more than 50 percent of the intention to vote.
However, others, such as Hinterlaces and some practically unknown in the Venezuelan or recent data market, including Polymarket, BMI Orientation and DataViva, conclude that Maduro leads his surveys with between 54 percent and 70 percent of the preference. Another, ECSC, talks about a technical tie tipped slightly towards opposition.
The C-INFORMA Information Coalition, made up of media teams such as Media-analysis, Cocuyo Effect, Fake News Hunters and Probox, concluded this month that 6 out of 14 firms evaluated, recently created and dubious credibility, have published 37 public opinion studies - used in a strategy - to manipulate the country's.
The main point of the article seems to be that there's a lot of misleading polling in general. Which is a fair point, but does kinda leave us outsiders in the dark
which makes all this commentary all the more appalling.
rationalism requires more than poorly-informed guesses. rationalism allows for the distinct and non-negligible possibility that surveys are gamed by manipulating the wording of the questions and/or who is asked to respond.
skepticism is more than toeing the line of whatever country you think is morally righteous
What's the mile long rap sheet though?
Venezuela’s terrible electoral record post Chavez.
And the fact the gov quietly funds roving mobs of bike gangs to intimidate the populace. On top of that they completely control 10% of the Venezulas cities.
Human Rights Watch described colectivos as "armed gangs who use violence with impunity" to harass political opponents of the Venezuelan government.[10][11] Amnesty International calls them "armed pro-government supporters who are tolerated or supported by the authorities".[12] Colectivos have attacked anti-government protesters[1] and Venezuelan opposition television staff, sent death threats to journalists, and once tear-gassed the Vatican envoy.[10] Through violence and intimidation, by 2019 colectivos increasingly became a means of quashing the opposition and maintaining political power;[9][13] Maduro called on them during the 2019 Venezuelan blackouts.[14][15]
And that in poor areas these armed gangs are directly involved in bringing people to voting stations
Every member of a colectivo is required to bring ten individuals to vote at polls during elections.[34] Over time, colectivos became more heavily armed and their criminal activity increased.[3] A small number of groups maintain community and cultural functions; most are "criminal gangs with immense social control", who "work alongside the security forces, often doing their dirty work for them", according to InSight Crime.[6] Members can be difficult to identify because they often wear masks and do not have license plates on their motorcycles.[9]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colectivo_(Venezuela)
The fact there were armed guards around the voting stations
We are meant to believe that Maduro outperformed his exit polling by twenty percentage points. Source: https://www.foreignaffairs.com/venezuela/venezuela-elections...
If you have serious doubts about whether the election was fair (it wasn't,) I'd encourage you to read the whole article as a primer on how and why the election was conducted and what it might mean for Venezuela going forward.
I've never seen any preliminary results announcing numbers of votes - it's always rounded up percentages with 1 or 2 decimals.
In my country (Korea) they broadcast vote counts, per district, in real time as data pours in from all over the country. It's a big entertainment going on for the whole night. And you can log onto the website of the office of the election commission and see raw numbers by each voting district.
It's 2024; I'd consider it a minimum level of government competency if anyone wants to be called a democratic country.
As an American, boy, do I have news for you…
This process led to a lot of controversy in the 2020 US Presidential election.
I'd say it's extremely common to announce numbers of votes both as they come in and when the final total is known. Here in the US major news networks (ABC, CNN, Fox, 270towin, and others) all have live maps that show the total number of votes + total percentages during the voting period. They usually also let you hover over the states/counties to see the percentages and votes for the particular area.
E.g. here's the Fox map https://www.foxnews.com/elections/2020/general-results and total votes comes first in the same font as percentages marked to the side. During the election these totals and percentages are live numbers.
And in the US we're not even that interested in the popular vote since it's all about the electoral college which has historically not always aligned with the popular vote numbers anyways yet we still list the totals as they come in.
If the vote numbers were not provided, this would not have been an issue. But in this case they did announce the vote numbers.
The article has been updated to mention this theory
Commenter Ryan points out that you could also explain this data pattern as a result of sloppy post-processing, if votes were counted correctly, then reported to the nearest percentage point, and then some intermediary mistakenly multiplied the (rounded) percentages by the total vote and reported that. I have no idea; you'd want to know where those particular numbers were coming from.
I’m inclined to believe this. It seems like if they had some grand conspiracy it’d be more likely for them to just add some votes here and there to the real number.
I hope you're right. If there's anything more insulting than having an election tampered with, it's having it tampered with... poorly. Like, you couldn't even bother to lie precisely?
That would mean that the group that released the percentage, and thus calculated it, was a different group than the one that released the raw numbers. That doesn't seem likely since they seem to be coming from the same gov't body.
This is an official election release, not some PR post on their website.
Big departments have lots of people, made up of smaller groups, they are not monoliths with a single mind.
True in general, but here "the President of the National Electoral Commission announced the winner". Sloppy in this situation equals malicious. And I wonder who gave the president the numbers to calculate with. ; )
Sure, and it's only "80%" (another sloppy-looking number) of the count, but these numbers are still useful in that it'd be an insurmountable lead. Independent decision desks don't wait for exact final tallies to call a race. It will likely take weeks for every single vote to be fully counted.
I agree this is at least sloppy work though. Apparently the explanation for the delay in full results is an ongoing cyber attack
That's the story we'll hear anyway, regardless of what actually happened.
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.
The question was "How likely is it that the votes worked out so well that they were basically even 1/10 percentages and not ugly numbers?"
So for a given number of votes, which determines a split, how many times does the split come out so nice? Answer: Effectively none - there are always ugly numbers with lots of decimal places.
Now that analysis comes after they conjecture that the percentages were fixed apriori. The first comment "That seems fishy" basically says this. "How can it be that we're so close to even 1/10 percentages. How can it be that we're exactly one vote off from nice 1/10 percentages"? Fishy indeed - must be rounding.
And they tell you: it's very unlikely to be 1 vote off from nice 0.1% percentage splits.
Another way of writing it out:
How likely is it that you'd get these votes distributions
51.2000000%
44.2000000%
04.6000000%
But it's also possible that there was sloppy reporting and the vote counts were re-processed at some point in the chain and rounded to one decimal place.
But that’s not what happened, if you read the article it actually expands everything out to the seventh decimal, and they’re not all zeros
It is equivalent to all zeroes with the numeric precision used.
Yes, they are not all zeros, but they are exactly what you'd expect if someone picked percentages that were all zeros, then added +1/-1 to get integer votes.
So the argument is once removed, but still compelling.
The numbers are definitely sus, but what if they were
52.2543689%
44.2689426%
04.6345625%
Basically the same 1/verymany chance, but that doesn't matter. The difference is that there's no particular reason to choose these numbers to start with. There _is_ a reason to choose nice round, but not too round numbers: that's what humans do.
The question is "How likely is it that humans would begin with those numbers when fudging?" answer is low.
But clean numbers? Much more likely.
The same probability as any combination of three results with 7 decimals and adding up to 100.
The question isn't "probability you get those exact numbers". It's "probability that you get numbers which all have at most N decimal places".
This comment perfectly distills this post.
It's more that if you start with those clean, single decimal percentages and a total number of votes, you'd end up with decimals for number of votes, which isn't possible. So if you then remove the decimal from the votes, you get slightly different percentage values when taken to 7 decimal places, but the original decimals would still be the same.
The chances of those numbers occurring normally for all 3 vote counts together is just ridiculously tiny.
Actually if you're going that many decimals its
51.1999971%
44.1999989%
04.6000039%Well there weren't zeros but within rounding error it was exact.
That actually gives a way to estimate the probability. There's 1002 choose 2 ways to divide 1000 permils over the 3 options. While there's 10 058 776 choose 2 ways to divide the 10 058 774 votes. That works out to about 1e-8 of the possible results being an exact multiple of 0.1% up to rounding error.
Of course an actual election doesn't simply pick one of the possible results at random (heck even if everyone voted randomly that wouldn't be the case). However these 'suspicious' results are distributed in a very uniform stratified fashion, any probability distribution that's much wider than 0.1% would approximately result in the same 1e-8 probability. And pretty much no reasonable person would expect a priori that the vote would result in such a suspicious number with such a high accuracy, so this should be considered strong evidence of fraud to most people.
That’s not what this article is about. Read the article.
FWIW, statistics is hard.
Having read the article, I came away with similar questions and I appreciate the sibling comments clarifying.
Fair enough. Sorry.
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.
Yes, but the comparison is not to "any random set of numbers" it's "all other random sets of numbers"
The candidate got 52.200000% of the vote instead of any other percentage, not another specific percentage.
The candidate got 52.200000% of the vote instead of any other percentage, not another specific percentage
No, he got 51.1999971%. It’s right there in the second table of the article
Some other comment in this discussion claims that if you nudged the total count integer +-1 you'll never hit 52.20000000% exactly hinting at the possibility that they choose 52.2% exactly, then computed the total counts which would be a non-integer and then just rounded that.
Once re-computing the percentage from that number you end up with the slightly less round-looking 51.1999971%.
The other commenters point at the explanation but don't explain it rigorously IMO. Here's how I'd say it.
60% is a nice, round percentage. In an honest election, this is just as likely to be reported as any nearby percentage, like 59.7% or 60.3%. As you mention, any particular percentage is equally (and extremely) unlikely. SUppose this you estimate the chance of this occurring, given an honest election, is 1/1000.
60% however is a much more likely outcome if the election results were faked sloppily. A sloppy fake is reasonably likely to say "Well, why not just say we won 60%". Suppose you estimate the chance of this occurring, given a sloppily faked election, are 1/100.
Bayes' theorem tells us that we can use this information to "update our beliefs" in favor of the election being faked sloppily and away from the election being honest. Say we previously (before seeing this evidence) thought the honest:faked odds were 5:1. That is, we felt it was 5 times more likely that it was honest than that it was sloppily faked. We can then multiply the "honest" by 1/1000 (chance of seeing this if it was honest), and the "faked" by 1/100 (chance of seeing this if it was faked), to get new odds of (5 * 1/1000):(1 * 1/100), which simplifies to 1:2. So in light of the new evidence, and assuming these numbers that I made up, it seems twice as likely that the election was faked.
This exact analysis of course relies on numbers I made up, but the critical thing to see here is that as long as we're more likely to see this result given the election being faked than given it being honest, it is evidence of it being faked.
Yeah, they just forgot to report 59.869280705993% instead of 60%. They would have got away with it too, if it weren't for those cunning statisticians. They just forgot to come up with a random, credible number. Happens to the best of us I guess.
To think they could have got away with it if only they hadn't forgotten.
That´s what you get when you defer the dirty work to interns on their first day, I guess. Which you always rely on to stay in power. Wouldn't want to rely on competent advisers who would have reminded you to come up with a non-round number with 8 or 9 decimals.
They would have got away with it too
Well, on this case they wouldn't. The smoking gun is their refusal to publish the counting totals, the round ratio is just some extra confirmation.
Yes. For one set. But if your next lottery is 4,5,6,7,8,9 and then 11,12,13,14,15,16 it becomes improbable.
The issue here is that a bunch of the percentages imply super round numbers.
The signal isn’t that there’s a round number. It’s that they’re all round numbers.
I've tried to explain this a couple of times, but I keep falling back on the calculations used to show the problem (that it's not the numbers themselves, but the pattern). This comment nailed it with simply "It's that they're all round numbers". I've always been terrible at rephrasing things to make stronger points in a more concise way. Thanks! :D
The second half of the article answers this very question.
Here's an example – if I generate 10 random numbers between 1 and 100, what is more likely: all ten are multiples of 10, or at least one is not a multiple of 10?
I think you are correct, but that's missing the point of the article's content. I'm just a programmer, not a math expert, but I believe these statements are accurate.
1. It's very easy to arrive at the provided values, if you make up some percentages that only go to a single decimal value (1/10th). Though doing so would result in vote counts that are decimal, as well. Then if you just remove the decimal from those values, the given percentages don't change enough to be incorrect, but even when taken to 7 decimal places, the new values are pretty clearly due to the rounding (44.2%: 44.1999989%, 4.6%: 4.6000039%).
2. While yes, the chance of these vote counts coming up in this kind of pattern is similar to the example you provided, even if you were using 0-9 for your example of 6 values, the total combinations is about an order of magnitude less than the total vote count provided here.
3. The finer point made is that there's a very small chance for one of the vote counts to show up as a number that so nicely fits the single decimal percentage, but in this case, all 3 vote counts fit this pattern. The calculations are shown for just 2 of the candidates (so not including the "other") resulting only a 1 in 100 million chance.
If the lottery administrator's daughter wins the lottery, he may say "no, no - don't you see, her probability of getting the winning numbers is exactly the same as anyone else's!"
But in reality, we can say that:
- her probability of winning in the world where her father is cheating is very high
- her probability of winning in the world where her father isn't cheating is very low
Together these two facts give us evidence about which world we're actually inhabiting - though of course we can never be completely certain!
In the same way, yes, it's equally (im)probable that the winning percent will be 51.211643879% or 51.200000000%. But the latter is more likely to occur in a world where Maduro said "get me 51.2% of the votes" and someone just did that mechanically with a pocket calculator, which is good evidence about which world we live in.
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/world/americas/biden-lula-discuss-ve...
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 center-right parties have created a vote sharing agreement with his party.
The anti-Bolsonaro center-right parties have 172 seats in the Chamber, Lula's governing coalition has 226. You need 257 to have a majority. This means Lula has to severely tone down his rhetoric otherwise a subset of the independent parties would defect to Bolsonaro's coalition.
but as a geopolitical news junkie
As someone who worked in the space, stop.
It's a waste of time as you're not in a position to make changes, nor are you reading primary or peer reviewed secondary sources.
If you insist on continuing, use a mix of
- Academic books (generally HUP, OUP, UCUP though the occasion PUP is alright)
- White Papers from top tier think tanks (use the UPenn Rankings [0])
- Axios and Politico - their target readership is aimed directly at those working on the Hill or Hill adjacent
Just sticking with these 3 types of resources should be enough.
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"
[0] - https://www.bruegel.org/sites/default/files/wp-content/uploa...
As someone who worked in the space, stop. It's a waste of time as you're not in a position to make changes
We need people in the top 25% of the clued range to speak up. Otherwise the loud morons in the bottom 25% are at risk of being taken seriously by the middle 50%. Arguments don't need to be peer-review-quality every time someone speaks.
People in the top 25% are not wasting their time posting comments to Reddit et al.
People who _think_ they are in the top 25%, sure.
People on this site are much more likely to be in the top 50%. Telling someone to shut up if they're not arbitrarily qualified is much more effective on people in the top quartile than the bottom one. [1]
r/AskHistorians and Twitter OSINT beg to differ. If you think those aren't the opinions of top 5% thinkers (only most informed out of 20 people, 1/2 are <100 IQ), then I question if you've met 40 average citizens before...
Twitter (Alperovitch / Silverado Policy, someone influential enough to be sanctioned by Russian gov.) and HN is what surfaced the Russian invasion months before it happened. No academic book or Axios or Politico article was there to inform you conclusively that early. Lesswrong and HN were also much earlier (Jan '20) to the Covid epidemic, a major geopol issue, than your sources.
I appreciate the recommendations, but you're presenting valid useful alternatives (to be used as imperfect parts of a synthesis) as "idiots" when there are major counterfactuals they were better at.
I still empathize that those institutional sources are usually much better than the average social media post or user.
Twitter (Alperovitch / Silverado Policy, someone influential enough to be sanctioned by Russian gov.) and HN is what surfaced the Russian invasion months before it happened
The CSIS [0], Atlantic Council [1][2], Politico [3], and the IISS [4] warned about an impending Russian Offensive in violation of the Minsk Agreements months before Feb 2022.
Alperovitch
Alperovitch had the benefit of having cofounded Crowdstrike and having worked closely with the NSC on multiple issues regarding Cybersecurity Policy, Russia-US relations, and China-US relations for almost 20 years.
He was absolutely synthesizing the same sources as the ones I provided during that time period.
[0] - https://www.csis.org/analysis/russias-possible-invasion-ukra...
[1] - https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/ukrainealert/is-putin-...
[2] - https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/ukrainealert/putins-ne...
[3] - https://www.politico.com/news/2022/01/21/baltic-allies-ukrai...
[4] - https://www.iiss.org/en/online-analysis/online-analysis/2021...
C'mon, you can't believe that any of those 5 sources offers the same conclusive Russian invasion information in advance as Alperovitch. Alperovitch was certainly using adjacent sources, but synthesized a strong assertion (rather than reporting potential concerns) in advance of the others. Therefore, his novel analysis (on Twitter!) was more useful than any of those, some of which are just reporting the concerns around Putin's essay or Donbas-related rotations a year before.
Essentially what I just said: "No academic book or Axios or Politico article was there to inform you conclusively that early."
And you admit Alperovitch's Twitter is useful for his NSC and geopol access.
but it's Chamber of Deputies has the actual power
Just to point for anybody reading this and trying to understand Brazil, that this is a huge simplification that may not hold for other events.
Agreed! Brazil has a very complex federal quasi-presidential system!
Please please please read academic books about the political history of Brazil or contemporary politics in Brazil instead of listening to a rando like me on the internet!
I'd recommend reading "Modern Brazil: A Social History", "The Brazilian Constitution of 1988: a comparative appraisal", "Constitutional Engineering in Brazil: The Politics of Federalism and Decentralization", etc, but there are some additional papers and books I could recommend as well.
Please please please read academic books about the political history of Brazil or contemporary politics in Brazil instead of listening to a rando like me on the internet!
LOL
Why should they stop if this is something they enjoy reading and learning about? Why should they want to or have to affect changes personally? I fail to understand the last part..
I believe the request is "Stop using your wrong beliefs to try to influence others", not "Stop reading inexpert opinions"
I am confused.
Are you arguing that Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva's official public stance on the Venezuelan election has no influence?
What I mean is he's way less publicly pro-Chavismo than he was in the 2000s because he is limited politically.
Axios is easy, butdo you mind expanding the acronyms to true newbs in the field? :)
BTW, how truly bad is Stratfor really these days?I had a subscription more than a decade ago and appreciated their geopolitical analysis essay format which provided the history, background, big picture, then detail and their forecast. Never cared much if their forecast was on the money, it was the human readable background which I found interesting :)
I never actually used Stratfor. They aren't well regarded.
The acronyms were University Presses/Publishers - they tend to publish academic books and have higher standards of factualness.
As someone who worked in the space, stop. It's a waste of time as you're not in a position to make changes, nor are you reading primary or peer reviewed secondary sources. If you insist on continuing,
You could have cut this out of your comment, and made your point much more effectively without the elitism.
This should remind us that "One Person, One Vote" can all too easily slip into "One Person, One Vote, One Time." For Venezuela that one time was in ~1998.
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!
In this case the question would be, do citizens in a democracy have the right to dissolve their government peaceably, provided they meet whatever threshold is required in that system (Could be a super majority, for the sake of argument)? I’d argue it must be or it’s not really a democracy.
They have the "right" to have a revolution too - many countries treasure the revolutions they had. They can amend the constitution and make another democracy. They can also amend the constitution and make a dictatorship. Or just have a dictatorship without bothering. Those do not need constitutions at all.
To have a vote that turns a democracy into a non-democracy is a meta-democratic vote, not a democratic vote. Abusing a democratic system to surreptitiously make a non-democratic system is just a caveat that dictators find convenient to use.
A dictator is just someone with absolute power. How he got the power is orthogonal. He doesn’t have to gain power through insurrection or a revolution, he can gain it inside a democratic system. In fact in Ancient Rome, where the term comes from, the Dictator was appointed by congress in times of crisis.
Indeed, dictators are dictators, including all those in your examples. In the cases I brought up, an elected leader can turn into a dictator by not leaving when they lose an election, canceling regular elections, faking the vote totals, etc. One Person, One Vote, One Time.
Dictator was appointed by congress in times of crisis.
A dictator was appointed by a consul, at the direction of the Senate, with the job of solving a specific problem.
The history of the dictatorship in ancient Rome, before Sulla, is really interesting, and differs quite a bit from the popular understanding: https://acoup.blog/2022/03/18/collections-the-roman-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.
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.
Switzerland has been a pure democracy since the 1800's and they're still not a dictatorship.
Twitter has been saying, "you can vote yourself into a dictatorship but you have to shoot your way out."
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. A high turnout in specific areas
3. Large numbers of invalid votes
4. More votes than ballot papers issued
5. Results that don't match
6. Delay in announcing results
I would encourage anyone from Venezuela to look into the history of elections in Africa. It is well documented and criteria well supported.
I would encourage anyone from Argentina
Surely you meant Venezuela?
Thank you! I had just been reading on another site about the US and it's "involvement" in a previous election in Argentina. Appreciate the correction. Oh my, I need to step away from the computer today. :/
One more tell tale sign is if a particular candidate's vote count correlates to voter turnout. That is a good sign of ballot box stuffing. [i.e. a candidate gets a higher percentage of the vote in districts with higher turnout]
Couldn't it also just be one party being very "organised" in that area and getting their people out to vote?
7. Outliers. Like in the recent Romanian votes, in the same building there were 4 booths. On 3 of them a party got around 150 votes each, on the fourth zero. But did the authorities care? No, because it's not their party.
I have family who volunteered as international election monitors and these are the criteria they used as well. Ironic, really. I've been against electronic voting for over a decade for the same reasons.
It's a ritual that if you don't do it correctly and with integrity, you get challenges to the results. Only question is how those challenges manifest.
Last year there was this HN post about people's efforts to validate results of the Nigerian elections.
This criteria is erroneous as the 2020 US election proved. The UN updated its Election Observation standards, and Venezuela's election mostly passes them.
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
Here is the CNE press conference where the numbers were announced: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pB7g4y4M4s8
Wonderful, thanks! I really struggled to find this. Funnily enough they give different percentages. 51.1% to 44.2%
round and round we go
No. The percentages reported don't matter. These are the same absolute vote numbers; the percentage they work out to is what matters.
This seems to be tripping a lot of people up.
It certainly does! Watch the video. No total number is ever reported
This means that "total votes" number was worked backwards by a third party. It's not even the CNE's fuckup
No. Watch the video. After Gonzalez' result, he reads the results para otros candidatos†. It's the same as the number in this post. It literally doesn't matter what else happens after this; you can reconstruct the result, after less than 2 minutes of the video's runtime. It's cooked.
† as you can see, i am not a fluent speaker of Spanish, and i managed to work it out :)
This means that "total votes" number was worked backwards by a third party.
Any school child can "work backwards" that if the vote counts are X for Maduro, Y for Gonzalez and Z for others the total number of votes cast for any of the candidates is X+Y+Z.
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.
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 solution.
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.
I disagree. I think the bar is low enough already. All you have to do is show up to the closest school. Its so easy that 10 year olds do it every day.
10 year olds don't have jobs and responsibilities.
That expense is worth our democracy not getting hacked.
Paper, no mail, vote one day on a holiday, count by that night, all manual all reviewed.
And voter ID required
This is why you don’t vote away your right to bear arms
Yea, be awful if, say the US, was on the precipice of slipping into a dictaorship. Thank god they've got guns, that'll make everything better!
Yes, an armed society is a polite society, and no one is more polite than, say, American police or the ATF or FBI or IRS.
If you see an American walk into a school or a hotel with a gun, you know everything is going to be A-OK.
Venezuela went from the richest country in South America to one where the average citizen lost 17lbs in a year. Once your economy looks like that, the slightest hint of armed unrest could collapse the government. The only reason Maduro stayed in power was because he could have the military shoot into unarmed crowds with no repercussions.
True.
But might not be a popular comment here. It seems many think you can carbon tax out of any problem.
There is one logical resolution to where Venezuela finds themselves. No one really believes they’re going to pull out of this economic situation, nor now this political one.
It seems many think you can carbon tax out of any problem.
What relevance does this have to gun ownership?
There were just as many, if not more, statistical anomalies in the US 2020 election, but all the guns stayed in their gun lockers then.
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.
Isn't this exactly what freedomtool aims to solve? https://freedomtool.org/#/doc
Aren't percentages typically rounded? I don't see any US results where it's reported that X candidate got 51.31112341% of the vote even if that's correct. More likely they would announce 51.31% or maybe even just 51.3%.
In fact, just looked up these results by CNN: https://www.cnn.com/election/2020/results/president
So Biden is reported as receiving 51.3% of the votes which is reported as exactly 81,284,666 votes. Though clearly if you sum all the votes and calculate Biden's share, you would not get exactly 51.3% but some other number, perhaps 51.31112341% (couldn't do the actual math as the page only reports Biden and Trump's votes but I believe there were other very small candidates who must have received some small number of votes). And if you took exactly 51.3% of all votes you would not get 81,284,666 but some other number close to that.
So I don't follow what's suspicious here? (As to whether there was election fraud or not, that's a completely different question, not commenting on that here.)
Update: Never mind the above, I had in my haste misread/misunderstood the point of the article :/ (see reply below)
It seems you only skimmed the article. The concern is not rounded percentage points.
The concern is that the total votes happen to be the closest integers possible to come up with exactly those single-decimal percentages. Indicating that the total votes were derived from the percentages, not from an actual tally of votes.
It's HIGHLY improbable that out of 10,058,774 votes, the distribution between Maduro, Gonzalez, and "Other" would all yield percentages that are effectively 1-decimal percentages.
Ah, got it. I had indeed misread/misunderstood the article.
Venezuela released the vote totals
https://www.albatcp.org/en/2024/07/29/cne-announced-nicolas-...
Their vote totals happen to align (almost perfectly) with round percentages
Fwiw most governments don't even report percentages. They just report totals and the percentages are added (by sites like CNN) for clarity
Didn't they show the distribution of votes on the TV and the sum there was 106%?
109%. Which of course isnt better.
That would make this whole article bogus.
Actually it didn't add up to 106%, although the reality doesn't matter. That the mud the CIA, NED etc. throw on Venezuela is all that matters.
https://x.com/weegeedutchie/status/1817903230946337121
No one cared to listen to the Spanish-language broadcast where it is explained that the 4.6% is for the other candidates combined. The stats indeed sum up to 100%.
Anyone else stuck in an endless "Verifying you are human. This may take a few seconds." cloudflare captcha loop?
Are you sure you're human?
I get this due to a browser extension I have (in my case it is the extension FreeTree, but chances are you aren't using that). Maybe try disabling all extensions and try the captcha again?
I'm really hoping these elections were fair, and that these figures are indeed the result of some poor communication as others have suggested. The last time a US backed coup succeeded in Latin America we ended up with 15 years of Pinochet in Chile. And before that 20 years of military dictatorship in Brazil. The last thing Venezuela needs is for the US to wreak havoc.
EDIT: having delved into the comments on this article a bit, it seems like there's no evidence of the government posting these vote tallies. Rather, they posted percentages. Where these tallies come from I don't know, but using them to conclude that the Venezuelan elections were rigged is more than a stretch.
it seems like there's no evidence of the government posting these vote tallies
They were released at a press conference. They read out both the numbers and the percentages. See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pB7g4y4M4s8
It is still plausible that this is an Excel error, but it's certainly suspicious.
http://www.sunai.gob.ve/sunai-web/public/index.php/publicaci... according to the acronym that’s some superintendent related to internal audits, that seems pretty official.
But still won’t stop the “the US manipulated the results crowd”, nothing will.
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 same leading digits as the percentages, which absolutely makes sense when the total vote count is near a multiple of 100. For example
>>> 0.5123 * 1_002_232
513443.45359999995
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.
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.
Yes. American international attention will help a lot like it has done with Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, Chile and so on.
The error in this analysis occurs due to the use of an Excel or LibreOffice spreadsheet that when the cell size is reduced it rounds to 51.2% and when it is increased it gives 51.199997136828
You need an integer number of votes, so you would expect it cannot be equal to an exact fraction. But being within a single vote bound is incredibly suspicious.
51.199997136828 is what you get when you do =ROUND(N_votes * 0.512)/N_votes. So it may as well be 51.2%.
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.
It's clear Maduro is running a near dictatorship and will do anything to keep power. The country is doing absolutely horribly, all due to mismanagement. Even with proof of fraud, he will pull whatever is needed to avoid stepping down at this point, as is the case with all autocrats.
When a country start building statues in every major city of the current running government leader, you are already past _near dictatorship_. This is full cult of personality and dictatorship bullshit.
EDIT: I saw images of venezuelans destroying statues all over the country but my partner who has been following better told me they were statues of Hugo Chavez, not Nicolás Maduro.
God, I love mathematicians!
There’s also the really powerful Benford’s Law which has been admitted in criminal court cases!
This reminds me of the story how the height of Mt. Everest was first measured at exactly 29,000 feet. The surveyor’s boss at the time added two feet thinking no one would trust such an exact number.
I wonder why he added two feet instead of three, or some decimal.
I find it quite amusing to watch people declare the Venezuela election stolen by the very same metrics they loudly proclaimed meant absolutely nothing in the 2020 US elections. At this point, it's not a hard bet to think I'll have more mirth coming my way in November.
There was a lot more light shone on the US elections. Over 60 cases were brought by Trump supporters, many before Republican judges, some of whome were even Trump appointees. All fraud cases were dismissed out of hand for lack of evidence. The only case not dismissed was about time allowed to vote.
If something was there, it would have come out. You have to get into Alex Jones level of deep state conspiracy to think all those judges and election officials were in on it.
https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2021/jan/08/joe-biden/...
I’d like to see a pattern that is likely to put this in perspective.
Rolling ten 1s in a row does look suspicious but it’s just as likely as rolling 4846211536
Is it possible some idiot was given the percentages, the total votes, and then decided they could just estimate the breakdown from the percentages for the announcement? Assuming stupidity before malice.
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”
It will be interesting to see if they release the tallies by region, on how those number will match with the overall result.
Yesterday there were news regarding 4 misterious flights from Cuba to Venezuela. Apparently a technical chinese team went there to rig the legitimate results, hence the delay to reveal them. Obviously unverifiable but I wouldn't be surprised to be true.
Source: https://www.infobae.com/venezuela/2024/07/31/grave-denuncia-...
As an argentinian and having lived the so called "K" period I can only say that we were extremely lucky not ending like Venezuela did (we are still facing a really hard time thanks to 20 years of robberies). For me, this period along with this so called "bolivarian revolution" (whatever that means) will forever be a reminder of how dangerous populism and empty political fanatisms can be. A model that can only spread poverty, corruption, and permanently fracture society just like in Argentina.
That seems fishy
They didn't explain why and it wasn't obvious to me. I had to think embarrassingly long about it.
It's because the tally by extended decimal shows that each of the 3 rows show that the tally was back-filled from a one-decimal-place desired result. With only 3 rows I'm not so sure how strongly this proves anything but it certainly is fishy.
EDIT: oh wait they do explain it. But only after they stated the conclusion so matter-of-factly first. I'd stopped reading because right then and there I thought I missed some fact or point earlier, or that they otherwise were presenting it as obvious and why wasn't it obvious to me?
some reporting [0] is claiming the opposite: 2.75 million votes for Maduro and 6.27 million for his rival, Edmundo Gonzalez.
[0] https://www.reuters.com/world/americas/government-opposition...
51.1999971, 41.1999989, 4.6000039, In this 3 numbers there are total 9+9+8=26 digits, if these 3 numbers are chosen randomly, what's the probability that there are 10 9's with 2 block of 4 consecutive 9's, 5 1's, 4 0's?
Let's approach this step-by-step using combinatorics:
1) First, let's consider the total number of possible arrangements: We have 26 digits in total, and the order matters. So, the total number of arrangements is: 10^26 (as each position can be filled by any digit from 0 to 9)
2) Now, let's count the favorable arrangements:
a) We need:
- 10 nines (including two blocks of 4 consecutive nines)
- 5 ones
- 4 zeros
- 7 other digits (26 - 10 - 5 - 4 = 7)
b) Let's start by placing the two blocks of 4 consecutive nines:
We have 19 positions to place the first block (26 - 4 - 3 = 19, as we need to leave room for the second block)
Then we have 15 positions for the second block
So, there are 19 * 15 = 285 ways to place these blocks
c) We need to place 2 more nines:
We have 18 positions left, so there are C(18,2) = 153 ways to do this
d) Now, we need to place 5 ones in the remaining 16 positions:
This can be done in C(16,5) = 4368 ways
e) Next, place 4 zeros in the remaining 11 positions:
This can be done in C(11,4) = 330 ways
f) Finally, we need to fill the remaining 7 positions with the other digits:
There are 7! = 5040 ways to arrange these
g) For these last 7 digits, we can choose any digit except 0, 1, and 9:
So we have 7^7 = 823543 possibilities for what these digits could be
4) Therefore, the probability is: (2.51654 × 10^17) / (10^26) = 2.51654 × 10^-9
So, the probability is approximately 0.00000000251654 or about 1 in 397,371,070,190.
Reminds me of https://danluu.com/discontinuities/
Coming from a family that lived in soviet russia (and still partly is), this reminds me of Putin’s 85% approval rating.
But if you ask anybody in private, nobody voted for him…
Hard to imagine a incumbant who destoryed the country while millions flee won the election, also hard to imagine he's going anywhere
If the post looks odd and makes no sense, it's because CF is blocking image loads.
I think there are two screenshots which are missing in the initial text.
The most important part of the article is buried in the PS:es:
Commenter Ryan points out that you could also explain this data pattern as a result of sloppy post-processing, if votes were counted correctly, then reported to the nearest percentage point, and then some intermediary mistakenly multiplied the (rounded) percentages by the total vote and reported that. I have no idea; you'd want to know where those particular numbers were coming from.
Author has no idea about how the vote counting process works, yet he spreads FUD. There are many plausible reasons why the tallies are "suspiciously well-rounded". The result was announced when it, according to the Venezuelan electoral commission, was clear that Maduro had an insurmountable lead. The cutoff point may just have been 51.2% with less than X% of the votes remaining. We don't know how their statistical modelling works.
statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu
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No thanks and fuck you to you too.
I used to think that there’s something terribly embarrassing about watching people like these lying in such a pathetically obvious way. Like catching my 5 year old in a lie. But I think I’m realizing that it simply doesn’t matter. They just need the “forged document” to hold up in their hands. Not to survive scrutiny.
BTW when actual raw electoral data is available it's possible to create infographics that far easier to read. Like there been Shpilkin graphs for every major Russia elections. When cental authorities trying to match specific number in percent of votes it's always obvious on scale.
Like you basically can see "cells" on these graphs that appear because of falsefied results on particular voting stations:
https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2021/10/11/russian-...
It could be someone having the total and percentages, and "reconstructing" the individual vote counts. Or, that's what they would say anyway in response to this.
[flagged]
I'm not sure I understand this battle-of-experts thing happening here. The Venezuelan authorities released the vote totals. They work out to exactly 51.2% vs 44.2%. That did not happen in the real world. Could not have.
We don't need the Carter Foundation to tell us these results are false. They are manifestly false.
If you read the addendum to the article they provide a perfectly plausible explanation: namely that (only) rounded percentages were provided to an intermediary and from there they back-calculated the counts.
Given that the US has claimed vote rigging in the past in Venezuela without evidence contrary to the determination of international observers (and has and is trying to overthrow the government to install a US-backed one) claims of vote rigging should be viewed with an enormous amount of skepticism.
They reported vote counts for both candidates that were fictitious. I don't understand how anybody can rationalize that.
I'm no fan of Maduro but I care about the politics of the region a lot less than I do about the mathematics of the situation. It's alarming to see people try to back-rationalize how these numbers could have been legitimate because, for instance (elsewhere on this thread), "it would have been easy for them just make realistic numbers".
Whatever else happened, these numbers are fictitious. If you want to come up with scenarios where the numbers don't matter, that's fine, you do you, I won't get in your way. But you can't rescue the numbers themselves.
As I and others (including in the original article) have explained it is a plausible result to create legitimately. Given the context that unsubstantiated vote-rigging allegations have occurred in the past (and the dire consequences of destabilizing a government based on false claims) extreme skepticism is warranted.
You can tell a story about a process that publishes these numbers in good faith, but not a story in which the vote counts reported are anything other than fictitious. It is not, in fact, an ordinary sequence of events to take true counts, work out their percentages, round them, discard the original counts, and work back new counts from the rounded percentages. Those new counts are a lie, no matter what the process was.
The rest of this, I don't care.
The entire issue is whether it was a "good faith" mistake. If you concede that...
I don't really think it's even a plausible mistake. Remember, to make the mistake, you have to retain the original raw vote total, but discard the original raw per-candidate totals, then recompute them from the rounded percentages and the retained original total. That doesn't make sense, for reasons having nothing to do with my level of trust in the election authority. It's several steps of extra effort for a result, read live on television by the election authority, that instantly destroys the credibility of the election.
I explained in another comment that these are the two most important numbers in an election and the two numbers everyone cites. Moreover, you might naively assume that they capture all the information about the election because, especially if you are not a STEM major and maybe even then, you might think you can just multiply the numbers to get the per-candidate tallies. And actually for most purposes it might be fine, you rarely need to know the tally to a tenth of a percent accuracy.
Just to be clear: across the thread, you can watch the video of the election authority reading these specific numbers, with great ceremony; it's not like this is a number that bounced through reporters at news outlets or something.
I don't know what to tell you except that typically the person doing the PR (in any country and field) often doesn't have a clue about the details of the process that generated the results they are reporting, despite any ceremony (in fact the ceremony is often intended to hide that fact). They usually have as much to do with producing the numbers as Jake Tapper does when he gets the numbers displayed on his teleprompter to read out.
And even if they did it wouldn't be obvious why they would think to care about whether the tallies are accurate to a tenth of a percent if the difference between candidates was much larger than that. They would think you were mental if you started a fuss about whether the intermediate result was really or 212,345 or 212,399, given that the main point was to declare a clear winner.
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.
That isn't the vote total, it is a provisional count. They're claiming "80% reported" which is already a tell that whoever is putting out the figures isn't treating them especially accurately. It is plausible that the figures are incompetence rather than malice and someone was back-calculating the number of votes from an accurate-enough percentage.
Pretty unlikely though. It isn't that hard to count votes.
Sure, but the 80% cutoff on the stat doesn't change anything here. The only way to report out these numbers is to start with the two percentages and work back to them, which would make them false!
I don't think there's a way to rescue these stats. Certainly I don't think the Carter Foundation or the International NLG has anything useful to say about them.
The Carter Center doesn't allege made up numbers. They alleged short voter registration deadlines, few places to register, minimal public information about voting, excessive legal requirements for citizens abroad.
As well as inequality in the resources each candidate had access to:
https://www.cartercenter.org/news/pr/2024/venezuela-073024.h...
I'm sorry, but I don't know what any of this has to do with the vote counts reported here, which are mathematically guaranteed to be fictitious.
The vote count is always fictitious. The tolerances on counting a vote aren't that detailed - if someone says that a candidate got ~10 million votes and gives a figure accurate to a single vote that isn't a true number. I've had family members help count votes and I can guarantee that mistakes are made, and there is the obvious point that in a multi-million person election there is probably going to be fraud in there somewhere.
So the question here isn't whether the NEC is publishing the true figure - because from its perspective it knows that it isn't, especially not a provisional vote. The question is what forms of inaccuracy are present and why. It obviously isn't adding up raw vote totals, but that still leaves two options here - fraud and appalling sloppiness (back-calculating totals from a reasonable %).
I'd lean to fraud, but if the people close to the action aren't alleging anything yet then maybe it is sloppiness.
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 publication isn't a smoking gun for the election, but they will all involve some deliberate manipulation of the numbers; for instance, you can try to rationalize a story where someone took the original vote counts, worked the percentages out, rounded them (so far so good), then discarded the original counts (uhhhhh) and synthesized new ones (triple yikes).
(I'm sorry to keep hedging this way, but I have to say again: cards on the table I think Maduro is awful, but my interest in this story is in the statistical anomaly, not the politics --- this for me is like that time HN got all wound up believing Google was dragnetting searches for pressure cookers after the Marathon bombing, which flunked plausibility due to a similar statistical argument; I like a pressure cooker, sure, but my real thing there was the base rate fallacy).
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 <V> votes, each candidate has scored <X%>". The NEC works out the overall percent for each candidate appropriately by weighting and sums the votes. Then, stupidly, back-calculates the number of votes for each candidate from those two figures.
That'd be a concerning level of incompetence in an office dedicated to counting votes, but it isn't a huge problem (especially in a provisional number - it isn't exactly wrong as much as needlessly suspicious). Apart from the fact that nobody thought to report raw totals by candidate which should be their first instinct. But it isn't manipulation as much as incompetence. The % would be accurate and the numbers indicative.
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.
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.
There’s a literal website with the pictures from the raw voting records.
People in this thread don’t know a lot of about the Venezuelan situation for how many opinions they seem to emit.
1. https://x.com/rusosnith/status/1818457492893884814?t=BtVOVhD...
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
What difference does it make if they're 80% of the votes, or even 30% of the votes? 3.5MM votes is still too many for there to be any realistic possibility of seeing these round percentages in the vote counts.
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.
I would say that the obvious rigging of the vote is a desired effect. Ditto for the obviously outlandish accusations of meddling by the Chilean secret service.
I think the message being sent now is: "I can rig the elections, you see it, and you can't do anything about it. I win because I say so." And his supporters see it and are happy that their leader is not a wimp.
Sr. Maduro's friend, Mr. Putin, has been sending the same message last few election cycles, when he's been running for president in umpteen time, despite any limits set by Constitution, etc.
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.
Yeah, and Hitler said he was a national socialist. We don't need to judge truth based on the words found in random twitter bios. We can judge Maduro based on his actions- disappearing the opposition leader and permanently hiding local election tallies are not the actions of someone who trusts vindication by a fair and open system.
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 tallies"
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 records are present, you can feel free to analyze them.
Someone already did analyze the data here: https://x.com/rusosnith/status/1818457492893884814?t=BtVOVhD...
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 escrutinio" that locals can request from their polling station?
I mean, allegedly this is a grassroots effort with all of the acta painstakingly aggregated... But the website is controlled by the opposition, so they could've just been made up (just like the numbers from CNE could be made up)
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)
There is no need to do any difficult OCR, the QR code contains the tally in machine-readable format. You just need a phone and copy the result to a csv file
Oh cool, I had no idea what the QR code was.
There’s over 20k images so using a phone isn’t feasible. But programmatically cropping the QR code and scanning it seems doable.
Thank you for your input
The thing is that these witness signatures could be forged (together with the tallies)
I assume that with "verified their records" you mean exactly what I'm asking for (but since I don't know any Venezuelan living in Venezuela, I haven't seen anyone verifying that stuff)
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.
Exactly my point, thanks!
This form of analysis has been used to verify the validity of past election results. All were within 2 points of forecasts based on this data.
We still don't have enough results to do this type of analysis yet, but we surely will eventually. The group that did the analysis you're linking is AltaVista. They are linked with the opposition, but their same analysis validated past results. Their current analysis obviously doesn't but they also admit that their sample is biased towards anti-Maduro centers.
My main point in responding to GP was to point out that it'd be impossible for Maduro to prevent this type of independent analysis
https://resultadosconvzla.com/
Claims
Actas digitalizadas: 24.576 (81,85%)
If that's true, 81% of the total would already be quite representative (and less subject to be biased by anti-Maduro constituencies being overrrepresented)
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.
How did Astavista gather these records? If they are submitted by the voters and if the research group is opposition funded, it could very well be that more opposition voters submitted? Genuine question because this is such a huge discrepancy and surely if its true, Maduro can't get away with it and he must know.
The electoral system in Venezuela mandates electronic voting. By law, each machine must print its results before sending the tally to a central server.
Multiple copies are printed. One goes to the CNE, another goes to the military, and several others are given to witnesses representing different political parties.
Each copy must be signed by all the witnesses, including the representative from the CNE.
The opposition candidate gathered as much as 80% of the total printouts and made them available for everyone to see and analyze.
Printouts can be validated because the result is digitally signed with a key that is known to the political parties and other organizations. The signature is at the end of each printout.
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 -__-
You're doing it too. You don't have to work this out in a chain of steps from first principles. Just look at the numbers.
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/venezuela/#:~:text=Mo....
1. https://www.edisonresearch.com/edison-research-conducts-exit...
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 confirm them
The fact that 8 million Venezuelans fled the country is of course sad, but the context is that the country has also been crippled by billion of dollars in sanctions. The UK alone "froze" 1 billion $ in Venezuelan's gold reserves.
The "Beyond Sanctions" section of this article goes into details:
https://covertactionmagazine.com/2024/07/30/venezuelans-re-e...
Hinterlaces is a government linked company, not exactly impartial.
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.
Exit polls run by the CIA:
"Venezuela’s right-wing opposition and US media outlets claim there was fraud in the July 28 election based on an exit poll done by US government-linked firm Edison Research, which works with CIA-linked US state propaganda organs and was active in Ukraine, Georgia, and Iraq." https://t.co/WNrUk6czFm
The "National Lawyers Guild" is certainly not impartial, but you can't honestly say that "The Carter Foundation" is either. They pick sides all the time.
I'd never heard of the National Lawyer's Guild. According to Wikipedia:
"The National Lawyers Guild (NLG) is a progressive public interest association of lawyers, law students, paralegals, jailhouse lawyers, law collective members, and other activist legal workers, in the United States."
"Activists" not generally compatible with "impartial". Some coverage of the situation I found very helpful is available here: https://www.readtangle.com/venezuela-elections-explained-mad....
(Edit: Fixed link)
This is surprising! I certainly have. Have you heard of the Carter Center? I hadn't till now.
Hmmm I don't think I agree with this logic. Or, imo, if you took it seriously, you'd have to excuse the Carter Center just as well. Regardless, I don't see how your link supports this statement. It just seems to be an AI summary of a bunch of different articles?
How can you be creating a voting app and never heard of the Carter Center? They’ve observed elections in 40 counties since 1989.[1] they’ve even been critical of US elections.
[1]https://www.cartercenter.org/peace/democracy/observed.html
So much the worse for the National Lawyers Guild then! The numbers are undeniably fake.
Given the transparently fake vote totals, perhaps we can update our priors on the impartiality of this guild.
they sent 5 observers only per https://truthout.org/articles/maduro-wins-reelection-for-thi...
Anyone who calls this election fair is not impartial. The scale of the fraud is enormous and undeniable.
Tell me, how many Venezuelans abroad were able to vote? How many were kept out of the country because the borders were closed? How many were threatened or intimidated into voting for Maduro? How many votes were cast using false ID? How many were confused by the ballot which had 13 options to vote for Maduro? How many polling stations were closed at the last minute?
If you want to claim to be impartial, you need to make a case that you are not biased. The NLG is far from that.
The numerical problem does not hinge on the reputability of any particular observer organization, though. You can just verify it on a calculator yourself!
Similarly, the call for local vote tallies is not unreasonable. Venezuelan law dictates they should have been made available by the government, and they were not. Though a lot of people took cell phone photos of the voting machine printouts locally; see e.g. the thread at https://x.com/DavidRomro/status/1817782928279007350 .
This is a strangely belligerent statement from an organization tasked with being impartial observers. I don’t know what to make of it, but it seems very odd.
edit: The use of the term “opposition” seems like a bit of a tell.
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Maduro is also saying that the mass protests he's facing are the product of Chilean-trained operatives acting against him, he says many things.
Gee I wonder why he might be paranoid about foreign operatives conspiring to violently oust him:
https://www.vox.com/2020/5/11/21249203/venezuela-coup-jordan...
https://consortiumnews.com/2019/01/28/the-dirty-hand-of-the-...
Because he’s an unpopular dictator who knows fairly well for having seen it in the recent past that you can go very quickly from getting 99% of the vote in an election to dead in a ditch? In his position you’re either paranoid or dead. This does not make him a better person.
You can have that personal belief, but independent analyses of past election results have upheld their validity. If he's a dictator, he's one that's earned the popular vote of Venezuela multiple times. Perhaps this time it's different
What do you consider to be independent? I’m seeing a lot of the opposite here for 2018 for example:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2018_Venezuelan_presidential_e...
Please don't down vote a post like the above just because you disagree with it.
just because you are paranoid that everybody is out to get you doesn't mean that everybody doesn't have good reason and that you don't really deserve it
Yeah I could see someone being paranoid from rigging several elections
Yeah and everyone's still waiting on D's tax returns.
Promises have to be kept.
Okay. I don't have an opinion. I just think GP's specific wording was misleading
Yeah, and Trump promised to release his tax returns. Around here, our sewage trucks have the word "Political Promises" painted on the side.
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The issue in this post has nothing to do with any of the outside election observers. You could replace the Carter Foundation with the CIA itself and you'd still be left with the same problem, which is that these vote counts are fictitious.
The comment I’m replying to says they’re “the only impartial observers who were in Venezuela for the election,” so I think the point stands - given their funding and connection to the US government and international capital, they can’t be considered impartial in this situation.
It might have been overstated but it's pretty tangential to the discussion. You can just imagine the poster made a typo, if that helps, and move on - the results look fishy and people have asked for the data. We don't really need to reconstruct the origin story of every asker.
Who would you propose as impartial?
How should they be funded, for you to consider them impartial?
Not by a country directly opposed to Venezula's government would be a good start.
The Carter Foundation stood up to the US govt in 2004, when they validated Chavez's win. Maybe they became un-impartial since then. But you're assuming a lot.
Is anyone really impartial?
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.”
I was curious to check the National Electoral Council website, to get their latest tally straight from the source...
http://www.cne.gov.ve/
And the website is currently not loading. They might simply be struggling to keep up with traffic, but being under some kind of "cyber attack" is also plausible
This would also be fairly trivial to fake if you wanted to appear to be under attack.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but you wouldn't have to fake anything if you just didn't use electronic voting.
Simply give a ballot to every voter and have them fill it out. Especially nowadays, as pretty much every election in every nation will come under cyber attack precisely because they are using electronic voting and hackers can manipulate the votes.
If I were being ungenerous, I would say all the politicians want electronic voting everywhere because they can manipulate it with cyber attacks.
The ungenerous take does not seem like a natural choice, its choosing to make yourself a little fish in a big pond, unless I'm missing something that makes it more appealing than traditional 'imaginative' means of gaining political power?
Yeah but I think this is the point where you have to take the pro-evidence side. Speculation with increasingly complex assumptions have to overcome a default assumption in favor of simplicity, and it requires evidence to overcome that default assumption.
In this case I would say the simpler assumptions are just that they did steal the election and that the website is down due to global traffic.
It's cne.gob.ve, and that doesn't work either. They want us to believe that because the website is down, the whole system that counts the votes is down. Hey, maybe the votes are counted in WordPress...
List of fake news anti-Maduro posts https://x.com/MyLordBebo/status/1818972331424768091
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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://x.com/Hinterlaces/status/1817599369471799639
In addition, there are plenty of other international observers that back the result. Like the National Lawyers Guild
https://nlginternational.org/2024/07/press-release-national-...
All of this seems irrelevant when the official Venezuelan percentages released add up to 109%. They didn't even try to make it look right, even in the most basic ways.
Where are you getting 109% from?
Journalist on Twitter debunked that. Not it's making the rounds.
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 they are recorded and posted in twitter.
The Carter Center praises Venezuela voting process before. Even if you ignore that the fact is the opposition has published the tallies they have collected while the CNE is still busy doing who knows what (fabricating them).
The 60/40 split was exit polling run by Edison, a CIA outfit.
Calling Hinterlaces "the most respected" is quiiiite a stretch. The owner Oscar Schemel, frequently parrots the govt propaganda talking points ("it's the evil empire, there's no inflation it's sabotage etc)
Exactly. You don't need advanced math. You only need to see the tallies for every voting center and make sum. I believe the opposition has already done this. The fact that the government has not done it shows that they just don't have the numbers.