[HN Gopher] Suspicious data pattern in recent Venezuelan election
___________________________________________________________________
Suspicious data pattern in recent Venezuelan election
Author : kgwgk
Score : 354 points
Date : 2024-07-31 20:34 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu)
(TXT) w3m dump (statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu)
| aa_is_op wrote:
| God, I love mathematicians!
| acchow wrote:
| There's also the really powerful Benford's Law which has been
| admitted in criminal court cases!
| TechDebtDevin wrote:
| There's literally nothing here worth repeating. But because its
| the type of "math" you'd like to see in this situation so
| you'll take it as truth.
| koube wrote:
| 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.
| Waterluvian wrote:
| 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.
| neura wrote:
| 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
| tumult wrote:
| That's not what this article is about. Read the article.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| FWIW, statistics is hard.
|
| Having read the article, I came away with similar questions
| and I appreciate the sibling comments clarifying.
| tumult wrote:
| Fair enough. Sorry.
| jvanderbot wrote:
| 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.
| tumult wrote:
| Another way of writing it out:
|
| How likely is it that you'd get these votes distributions
| 51.2000000% 44.2000000% 04.6000000%
|
| _exactly?_ With all of those clean 0s? Very low.
|
| 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.
| neura wrote:
| 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.
| achempion wrote:
| The numbers are definitely sus, but what if they were
| 52.2543689% 44.2689426% 04.6345625%
|
| How likely is it that you'd get these votes distributions
| exactly with these exact tails? Compared to all other
| possibilities?
| kadoban wrote:
| 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.
| jvanderbot wrote:
| 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.
| noitpmeder wrote:
| This comment perfectly distills this post.
| melenaboija wrote:
| The same probability as any combination of three results
| with 7 decimals and adding up to 100.
| staunton wrote:
| 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".
| contravariant wrote:
| 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.
| happyopossum wrote:
| 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
| tumult wrote:
| It is equivalent to all zeroes with the numeric precision
| used.
| jvanderbot wrote:
| 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.
| paxys wrote:
| 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?
| neura wrote:
| 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.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| > 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.
| happyopossum wrote:
| > 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
| enoch_r wrote:
| 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.
| ChadNauseam wrote:
| 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.
| a0123 wrote:
| 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.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| > 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.
| casenmgreen wrote:
| 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.
| paxys wrote:
| TL;DR - the percentages of votes for all three candidates have
| just one decimal point each, which is wildly improbable
| considering there were over 10 million votes.
| energy123 wrote:
| If it was just 2 candidates, it would be slightly more
| believable, a 1 in 10,000 chance instead of 1 in 100 million
| chance.
| readthenotes1 wrote:
| Well, that is Maduro, a 1 in 100 million leader. There are
| fewer than 28 million people in Venezuela so the rest of us
| better watch out!
| suzzer99 wrote:
| 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-...
| culi wrote:
| Maduro has already vowed to release election data...
| forgetfulness wrote:
| 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.
| pydry wrote:
| 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...
|
| >The plan, to be executed two months later in November,
| consisted of two parts for the roughly 300 men. One team
| would take over Maracaibo, Venezuela's second-largest city,
| which has a crucial seaport. A second team would
| simultaneously push to Caracas, the capital, to launch an
| air assault on Maduro's mansion with US helicopters flown
| by American pilots wearing Venezuelan military garb.
|
| >Once inside the compound, the ex-soldiers, armed with US-
| provided machine guns and night-vision goggles, would
| capture Maduro and hold him
|
| https://consortiumnews.com/2019/01/28/the-dirty-hand-of-
| the-...
|
| >Leopoldo Lopez and Maria Corina Machado- two of the public
| leaders behind the violent protests that started in
| February (2014) - have long histories as collaborators,
| grantees and agents of Washington. The National Endowment
| for Democracy (NED) and the U.S. Agency for International
| Development (USAID) have channeled multi-million dollar
| funding to Lopez's political parties
| fsckboy wrote:
| 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
| kergonath wrote:
| > Gee I wonder why he might be paranoid about foreign
| operatives trying to violently oust him
|
| 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.
| 1270018080 wrote:
| Yeah I could see someone being paranoid from rigging
| several elections
| a0123 wrote:
| Because that's never happened before. Especially not in
| South America. Would be unheard of.
|
| Can't help but notice in the parent comment the conspicuous
| lack of quotations from a variety of international
| observers about how the election looked perfectly
| legitimate (international observers are pretty unknown to
| most Americans because they're barred or heavily obstructed
| during every single American election - I know... the irony
| am I right???)
|
| Not mentioning calling the Carter Center the "only
| impartial" source which is quite the statement due only to
| the fact that it's named "Carter" (quite possible that
| comment has no idea why it's called that).
|
| You can "downvote" all you want, it won't hide your blatant
| ignorance of facts or history.
| forgetfulness wrote:
| Chilean intelligence being the black hand behind the
| protestors rising up against a stolen election is pretty
| far fetched, South American countries haven't meddled to
| that level in one another since the XIX century, which
| was more of a diplomatic free for all in much of the
| world, so you also saw secret treaties, sponsored coups,
| puppet Governments, and all that.
|
| Maduro had promised to let international observers in,
| but began withdrawing the invitations a few months ahead
| of the elections, and the Carter Foundation was one of
| two to be allowed a restricted "technical" observation.
|
| The US would benefit from international observers these
| days, frankly, casting doubts over its electoral system
| has been used to ill effect to its political stability by
| bad actors.
| kergonath wrote:
| > Can't help but notice in the parent comment the
| conspicuous lack of quotations from a variety of
| international observers about how the election looked
| perfectly legitimate
|
| Come on now, there are plenty of NGOs and well informed
| governments who say these elections were dodgy. There you
| have it, I am happy to provide links if you do.
|
| > (international observers are pretty unknown to most
| Americans because they're barred or heavily obstructed
| during every single American election - I know... the
| irony am I right???)
|
| Because of course the world is divided into Venezuela and
| the US and nothing relevant ever happens anywhere else.
| Am I right?
|
| (If you did not read between the lines, the US is not the
| best example of a working democracy you could find, but
| it does not mean that those don't exist)
|
| > Not mentioning calling the Carter Center the "only
| impartial" source which is quite the statement due only
| to the fact that it's named "Carter" (quite possible that
| comment has no idea why it's called that).
|
| Please, Wise One, enlighten us with more than half-
| implicit allegations.
|
| > You can "downvote" all you want, it won't hide your
| blatant ignorance of facts or history.
|
| I am happy to oblige, but puzzled as to how you can judge
| my knowledge of history. Also why you sound like a
| Russian troll.
| destring wrote:
| He probably is. There's no sane person that can defend
| what is happening in Venezuela. I'm Venezuelan and had to
| immigrate due to the countries condition. Out of more
| than 7 million that left only around 200k could vote from
| Outside. The want for change was such that even
| disbarring 7 million people they still lost.
|
| I come here to get my tech news and encounter people
| doing government propaganda.
| lawlessone wrote:
| >Maduro has already vowed to release election data...
|
| Yeah and everyone's still waiting on D's tax returns.
|
| Promises have to be kept.
| culi wrote:
| Okay. I don't have an opinion. I just think GP's specific
| wording was misleading
|
| > which apparently it is never going to do
| rcardo11 wrote:
| 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."
| culi wrote:
| > The Carter Foundation, the only impartial observers who were
| in Venezuela for the election
|
| Where do you get the opinion that they're the "only impartial
| observers"? The National Lawyers Guild was also an observer and
| wrote that their delegation in Venezuela "observed a
| transparent, fair voting process with scrupulous attention to
| legitimacy, access to the polls, and pluralism". They strongly
| condemned the opposition's "attacks on the electoral system as
| well as the role of the US in undermining the democratic
| process".
|
| https://nlginternational.org/2024/07/press-release-national-...
| tptacek wrote:
| 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.
| roenxi wrote:
| 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.
| stateofinquiry wrote:
| 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)
| culi wrote:
| > I'd never heard of the National Lawyer's Guild
|
| This is surprising! I certainly have. Have you heard of the
| Carter Center? I hadn't till now.
|
| > "Activists" not generally compatible with "impartial".
|
| 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?
| sobellian wrote:
| Given the transparently fake vote totals, perhaps we can
| update our priors on the impartiality of this guild.
| dinobones wrote:
| 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.
| nikolay wrote:
| What's wrong with announcing results with rounded percentages?!
| kadoban wrote:
| Nothing. The problem is when you obviously picked the rounded
| percentages that sounded good first and then calculated the
| number of votes from that.
| nikolay wrote:
| 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?
| lxgr wrote:
| But they did report the absolute number of votes.
| kadoban wrote:
| 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?).
| forgetfulness wrote:
| 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.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| 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.
| KennyBlanken wrote:
| 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.
| paxys wrote:
| The didn't announce the percentages, they announced the vote
| counts.
| nikolay wrote:
| Why is that article not pointing to the source? I've looked
| for it, and I couldn't find it.
| kgwgk wrote:
| https://x.com/yvangil/status/1817787106237743565
| nikolay wrote:
| 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.
| a0123 wrote:
| See when Western democracies do it, it's "just to make it
| simpler"
|
| When non-Western dictatorships do it, it's "fraud".
|
| When Western democracies interfere with international
| observers (you'll never guess which country I'm thinking of),
| it's "our country, our sovereignty, ain't no one telling me
| how to do shit".
|
| When non-Western dictatorships let them do their jobs, it's
| "well, the absence of obvious interference is just a sign
| that they cheated in a non-conspicuous and highly discrete
| way that we have yet to determine".
| devnullbrain wrote:
| In western democracies, among others, we use "" to denote
| that we are quoting somebody.
| killingtime74 wrote:
| In western countries power is handed over routinely amongst
| political enemies. So what, the incumbent is cooking the
| books to give power to their rival? If power is being
| handed over, where is the book cooking?
|
| Here they are staying in power.
|
| You think the Liberals in Australia wanted to give power
| over to Labor? You think Obama liked having Trump follow
| him? Macron cooked the votes so his own party lost the
| majority?
| noduerme wrote:
| Or maybe western democracies do demand higher standards of
| transparency. Notice which countries called to congratulate
| Maduro immediately without waiting a day to find out if any
| the announced results were valid: Russia, Iran and Cuba.
| Paragons of liberty.
| stoperaticless wrote:
| s/(non-)?western//g
|
| > See when democracies do it, it's "just to make it
| simpler"
|
| > When dictatorships do it, it's "fraud".
|
| Seems plausible.
|
| Credentials and reputation matter.
| KennyBlanken wrote:
| 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.
| tomp wrote:
| 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:
| ertgbnm wrote:
| 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.
| amelius wrote:
| Tests should have checksums built into the correct answers.
| einpoklum wrote:
| 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.
| gmaster1440 wrote:
| 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?
| verbify wrote:
| 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.
| energy123 wrote:
| 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.
| aaplok wrote:
| 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.
| DonsDiscountGas wrote:
| 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.
| a0123 wrote:
| 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")
| a0123 wrote:
| So in their elaborate plan to cheat, they didn't for a second
| consider coming up with a random ugly number to make it look
| more credible.
|
| The easiest thing to do?
|
| Especially when you consider that this is the constant excuse
| "independent observers" come up with whenever they want to
| delegitimise an election they don't like the outcome of.
|
| What are the statistical chances of them just forgetting? Can I
| get a breakdown?
| tryauuum wrote:
| I don't understand your logic.
|
| "The easiest thing to do" is to do less thinking, less
| mathematical operations
| educasean wrote:
| Many instances of numerical manipulations end up being
| discovered because the cheater didn't understand math well
| enough to hide their tracks correctly.
|
| See this link for a recent example that's been on my mind: ht
| tps://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mnet_vote_manipulation_inves...
| Basically, they just grabbed a random-looking numerical
| constant and used its multiples as the difference between
| vote numbers.
| stapled_socks wrote:
| 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.
| nikolay wrote:
| I've never seen any preliminary results announcing numbers of
| votes - it's always rounded up percentages with 1 or 2
| decimals.
| ptero wrote:
| If the vote numbers were not provided, this would not have
| been an issue. But in this case they did announce the vote
| numbers.
| zamadatix wrote:
| 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.
| yongjik wrote:
| 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.
| mihaaly wrote:
| 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. ; )
| worstspotgain wrote:
| 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.
| culi wrote:
| 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/ven
| ezuela-...
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _What 's the mile long rap sheet though?_
|
| Venezuela's terrible electoral record post Chavez.
| q1w2 wrote:
| 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.
| shusaku wrote:
| 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.
| __MatrixMan__ wrote:
| 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?
| danihh wrote:
| 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...
| consumer451 wrote:
| 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...
| alephnerd wrote:
| > 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...
| NikolaNovak wrote:
| 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 :)
| alephnerd wrote:
| 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.
| worstspotgain wrote:
| > 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.
| TimedToasts wrote:
| 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.
| worstspotgain wrote:
| 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]
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning-Kruger_effect
| reducesuffering wrote:
| 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...
| sureglymop wrote:
| 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..
| digging wrote:
| I believe the request is "Stop using your wrong beliefs to
| try to influence others", not "Stop reading inexpert
| opinions"
| reducesuffering wrote:
| 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.
| alephnerd wrote:
| > 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...
| reducesuffering wrote:
| 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 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.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| > 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.
| alephnerd wrote:
| 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!
| pydry wrote:
| _shrug_ The US has accused pretty much every Venezuelan election
| of being rigged, no matter the evidence. It 's become
| ritualistic.
|
| In 2002, they recognized Pedro Carmona who staged a failed,
| violent military coup as the new president.
|
| In 2020 they tried to stage their own failed coup:
| https://www.vox.com/2020/5/11/21249203/venezuela-coup-jordan...
| RND_RandoM wrote:
| Didn't they show the distribution of votes on the TV and the sum
| there was 106%?
| victorbjorklund wrote:
| 109%. Which of course isnt better.
| whalesalad wrote:
| Anyone else stuck in an endless "Verifying you are human. This
| may take a few seconds." cloudflare captcha loop?
| NJRBailey wrote:
| 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?
| jiveturkey wrote:
| > 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?
| insane_dreamer wrote:
| 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)
| PaulStatezny wrote:
| 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.
| insane_dreamer wrote:
| Ah, got it. I had indeed misread/misunderstood the article.
| marinmania wrote:
| 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
|
| https://results.elections.ny.gov/document/468?page=1
| notjoemama wrote:
| 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.
| the_af wrote:
| > _I would encourage anyone from Argentina_
|
| Surely you meant Venezuela?
| notjoemama wrote:
| 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. :/
| sam36 wrote:
| I love how if you post that list in response to American
| elections you get downvoted:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25364379 But using it to
| critique other nations is perfectly fine. I mean, it's not like
| anyone has ever had signatures thrown out to win a senate
| election (Obama). And there is nothing strange about Biden
| winning less counties than Hilary (who lost).
| bearve wrote:
| 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
| energy123 wrote:
| 51.199997136828 is what you get when you do =ROUND(N_votes *
| 0.512)/N_votes. So it may as well be 51.2%.
| phonon wrote:
| 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.
| webscalist wrote:
| Election Fraud and you get an instant ban
| worstspotgain wrote:
| 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.
| oceanplexian wrote:
| 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?
| worstspotgain wrote:
| 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!
| oceanplexian wrote:
| 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.
| johnklos wrote:
| Why is Cloudflare blocking access to this page? Why would
| Colombia even consider using a company like Cloudflare when it's
| universally known that Cloudflare makes viewing a web site
| difficult across much of the world?
|
| If you want to share information and not just reinforce your own
| little bubble, you don't filter your content. Cloudflare is a
| filter, and a bad one at that.
| zamadatix wrote:
| They're probably just happy to keep the site up at all without
| constantly babying it whenever a spike like this occurs.
| osigurdson wrote:
| 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?
| ranon wrote:
| Isn't this exactly what freedomtool aims to solve?
| https://freedomtool.org/#/doc
| feedforward wrote:
| It's funny to see all the Americans here, whose last president
| said there was vote fraud along with most of his party, who had
| riots in Washington DC after the elections, pontificating about
| Venezuela.
|
| The US establishment has been saying the Venexuelan government is
| illegitimate since it backed a coup attempt back in 2002.
| Everyone already knew the US would be saying the election was
| illegitimate before it happened. It's not really the Yanquis
| concern any how.
|
| The former US president who says the last US election was a fraud
| is at 50% in the polls. Continue pontificating about a Latin
| American country refusing to hand It's oil over to US
| billionaires though...
| jijji wrote:
| 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...
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