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.
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.
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.
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.
The results we're discussing were read live by the president of the Venezuelan electoral authority. It is possible that they... simply read the wrong results? Like an internal estimate rather than the real numbers? But that is a wild mistake for the electoral authority to make.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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]
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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")
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Many instances of numerical manipulations end up being discovered because the cheater didn't understand math well enough to hide their tracks correctly.
I have always called the argument that someone couldn't have possibly done it because it would be stupid to have done so the "Connie Defense" after a woman who tried to assert same before I picked her up and put her out of the house like Fred Flinstones cat.
This was after she was caught driving without a license while speeding and smoking weed in a state where it was still illegal.
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.
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.
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.
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?).
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).
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.
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?
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):
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.
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]
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. :/
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.
If you consider the US election to clearly not have been rigged, then you should question the legitimacy of the signs listed in the top level comment.
If the signs don't convince you that the US election was rigged, they shouldn't convince you of other elections being rigged, either.
(I'm not from the US and don't care much about the US election. But I do think that the comment which sadly was flagged made a valid point about the signs not being useful indicators if they also apply to elections which are not rigged.)
Why? What happened in 4 years that revealed to everyone beyond a doubt that it wasn’t legitimate?
Where I live, no one questions that the election was rigged. Most believe it was. I haven’t done enough of my own research to know one way or the other.
The key is that every single challenge has been debunked, often in court and often by Republican judges. When every challenge has been debunked, it's time to accept that the vote was fair.
The problem is that it's too easy to hallucinate new challenges. It's easy to claim some guy stuffed ballot boxes with no evidence, and if people want to believe that, they will unless given irrefutable proof to the contrary. But how do you prove irrefutably that Fidel Castro definitely did not stuff all the ballot boxes? Apparently, you can't.
It's a bit like discussing whether God exists. Ya lots of people believe it and you can certainly talk about it. But this isn't really a forum for that kind of conversation.
This criteria is erroneous as the 2020 US election proved. The UN updated its Election Observation standards, and Venezuela's election mostly passes them.
Which criterion specifically was violated during that election? A lot of people seem to think there was a delay in reporting results, but there's a differences between a reporting delay and a counting delay. Most districts report counts incrementally, so if it's taking a long time to open thousands of envelopes, and it's a close race, you get incremental updates, but no final verdict until enough are counted.
Also, a crucial difference in the US is that each party sounds poll watchers to every single polling station to watch people count the results.
Would be very interested to know if there are any serious claims that any of these other criteria were violated
"so if it's taking a long time to open thousands of envelopes, and it's a close race, you get incremental updates, but no final verdict until enough are counted."
Exactly. The criterion is delay in announcing results, but the election was legitimate so there's an issue with the criterion.
"there's a differences between a reporting delay and a counting delay."
I would say there's a very meaningful difference between "they're still counting the results, and releasing incremental counts, and all is being watched by poll watchers" vs. "we've finished counting, but we're not releasing the results for a while, and nobody is monitoring the process". The former sounds great. The latter sounds very suspicious.
Maybe it's just an issue in how the standards are interpreted by some people.
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.
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
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]
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.
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.
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
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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
I had pulled an all-nighter (writing a grant proposal actually) and was steaming mad reading this and had to scroll a bit. May be a comment like this will help someone else out who might be confused.
> 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.
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:
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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's all nice looking for suspicious patterns but a bit pointless when the election is very obviously rigged (107% of votes counted etc) and Maduro is like I control the army what you going to do about it?
The latter is a more interesting question. There must be some way to get vote rigging dictators out?
> There must be some way to get vote rigging dictators out?
If only other countries wasn't supplying dictator regimes with money, but it's very hard to do. Especially after EU gave enough money to another dictator to make him into much more dangerous warmonger. So now Venezuela isn't the worst dictatorship and it's will get more money from oil.
I don't know really but the US was able to go arrest Noriega without too much grief and Britain where I live used to take over loads of countries for it's empire before that became politically incorrect. Maybe we could have some modified version limited to support a countries peoples against illegitimate rulers on a kick them out, hold elections then leave basis?
Maybe we could have something like a modified version of the US constitution like: We the People of the world, in Order to establish Justice... reserve the right to kick the bastards out and elect a new bunch, by force if necessary.
It was a landslide for the opposition candidate Gonzalez, 67% to Maduro’s 30%.
Sadly, the mathematical analysis in the OP is no match for the power of state brutality. It’s fun to point out the cheating, but ultimately it reminds me of xkcd 538.
How do the witnesses know how people voted? I can't find sources saying whether Venezuela has as secret ballot or not, but I assume so otherwise it would be all over the news
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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'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
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%.
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.
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%.
I love trying to imagine what it's like being inside the mind of somebody who can entertain this kind of material (assumptions based on statistics, alone), while simultaneously believing that the 2020 US presidential election was sound and secure.
I also love imagining what it must be like to read a comment like this and thinks it's political in nature.
It's disingenuous to say discussion about election fraud isn't political in nature, what else could it be? I dismissed the 2020 US election fraud claims without looking into them, but I've seen it brought up a few times in this thread and people on HN usually hold reasonable views. After some research I've found nothing remotely convincing.
Could you point me towards something like the data presented in this article? That's not to say that this is definitive evidence, but it's an order of magnitude more convincing than anything I've found about the 2020 US election.
It's not possible to point out the evidence any longer - those days are over. There was a public plan, by the government and the host of big tech companies that are in bed with that government (In-Q-Tel, for example, is not some big secret), to silence anyone discussing it. You wouldn't here much about this, because of this.
Conspiracies happen, and the nature of those conspiracies is that they futher somebody's goals (Bush family, CIA, big corporations, who knows), and they're secret plans for a reason, because they run counter to the will of the general public, so knowing about them reduces the actors' chances of success. Large efforts are put into place to keep ordinary people from hearing or thinking about them, until they achieve their goals. High level government agents have testified in front of congress about such efforts, many times in the past.
Rewind to 2003; the selfsame government was engaged in wide-spread lying to convince us that there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, and the media was fully complicit in supporting these lies. I lost my best friend, in that war, in 2006, because the big corporations, in concert with the government, convinced everyone to believe in nonsensical lies.
That war would not have happened if somebody said "wait, they're lying, and here's the proof", and people would have heard about this (on the news), before the war was well underway.
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.
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.
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.
We all mock these third rate dictatorship issues, but then in America we allow voting without ID or any sorts of protection at all... Basically asking people to commit fraud.
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 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.
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.
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?
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.
How do you ensure one person one vote without giving an authority the sole power of creating keys? How do you prevent them creating additional ones?
What happens if someone dies between generating a key and the election? What stops someone else casting their vote?
What happens if you loose your key? How do you prove it in order to get a new one?
What happens if your key is stolen? How do you blacklist it without creating a capability of blacklisting anyone's keys?
If you are voting electronically at a polling station, what stops the machines casting vote differently than the button press and showing something different on the screen? There is no audit that can find that, and you have no recourse and no proof if this happens. If voting is at home, what stops someone standing over you to intimidate you into voting a certain way or bribing you for a vote?
How do technically illiterate people exercise their right to vote?
What happens if there is a server outage? The entire democracy will get thrown into chaos.
What if someone decides the cost of a 51% attack is worthwhile in order to take over a whole country?
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?
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.
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.
More on this. The Carter Foundation, the only impartial observers who were in Venezuela for the election, and who previously defended Venezuela's election system following Chavez's 2004 win, has called on Maduro's government to release local vote tallies, which apparently it is never going to do: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/31/world/americas/venezuela-...
Maduro just responded to a journalist from the Washington Post that they will not be able to show the local vote tallies now because, at this moment, the National Electoral Council is in “a cyber battle never seen before.”
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
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...
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.
The Carter Foundation is absolutely not impartial here. They get funding from CIA cutout USAID, the US State Department, Meta, the Walton Family Foundation, National Democratic Institute, Open Society Foundation and so on: https://www.cartercenter.org/donate/corporate-government-fou...
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.
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.
> 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".
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].
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:
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"
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
> Their current analysis obviously doesn't but they also admit that their sample is biased towards anti-Maduro centers.
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
It's very unclear what you're trying to say here. Nobody is talking about a forecasted 100%-of-returns outcome. They're talking about the 80%-of-returns number that the ECN announced.
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.
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)
Do you have any details about the kind of mechanism that they used?
If it's a private/public kind of mechanism, they should be able to disclose the public key for signature verification.
If it's not, and it's some kind of a HMAC, and the political parties have all access to the key... Then this doesn't protect at all against the threat implied (the different parties don't trust each other, and both claim that they are trying to "steal" the election), since these signatures could be forged by any of the political parties with access to the key
Even in the former case, it could be possible that a machine could be compromised, and could have emitted two tallies (one for the actual election, and another one with different numbers and forged signatures). In that case, we would still want to check that the local polling station can confirm that the Acta that we're seeing is congruent with what they have
I also agree the parties should disclose the public key and the parameters to calculate the hash.
The code and the keys are stored in a database that is audited by political parties before the election. What I’m not certain about is whether they have access to it at this time.
Proving the validity of the acts should be trivial, especially for any party who had access to the audited database. There is little point in forging fake ones.
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
> Many Venezuelan people have verified their records. Including the “witnesses” who have signed all the records. The signatures can be seen on the pictures
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)
You could make a public spreadsheet so others can join in on the crowdsourced effort
Just make a list of every precinct and whether or not we have a screenshot for them. People can help by uploading more pictures and which precinct it corresponds to and also manually reading the results and updating the spreadsheet
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:
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 -__-
As is explained in detail here: https://x.com/i/broadcasts/1YpKklRpzAyGj
The signatures on the Actas are digital, not ink. The testigos sign on the voting machine's screen. The machine will print out the receipt once the witnesses agree to the electronic count against their tallies of the individual paper votes. After printing, the machine goes online to transmit the electronic results, which can always be audited by the physical results.
What's more likely, that the opposition forged tens of thousands of receipts in less than a day, or a dictator reported fake results to remain in power? Receipts, mind you, copies of which are given to each witness from the top-three political parties, at any point now could have been called into question but not a single counter example has been shown.
Please don't drink their "North Macedonia" hack kool-aid.
>The signatures on the Actas are digital, not ink.
Yes, each acta has a digital signature, gathered ahead of time. It is there to compare against the inked signatures signed by the members of the mesa, after confirmation that the sampled ballots converge toward the computer's results. The ballots are the source of truth here, not what the computer receipt says. And the link between the ballots and the receipt are the inked signatures (or fingerprints) of the members of the mesa.
>What's more likely, that the opposition forged tens of thousands of receipts in less than a day, or a dictator reported fake results to remain in power?
The opposition need not have been the one to hack the machines. A third party could have done that. And again, the opposition haven't released "forged" receipts, merely receipts that have not actually been certified. How they have obtained those receipts is an open question at this point.
>Receipts, mind you, copies of which are given to each witness from the top-three political parties, at any point now could have been called into question but not a single counter example has been shown.
90% of their receipts lack any inked certification from the presidents, secretaries, members, witnesses, or operators of the mesas on the ground. That should be garnering an enormous amount of skepticism from a crowd that is normally adamant about not trusting computers during elections.
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."
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?
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.
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 .
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.
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:
> The electoral campaign was impacted by unequal conditions among candidates. The campaign of the incumbent president was well funded and widely visible through rallies, posters, murals, and street campaigning. The abuse of administrative resources on behalf of the incumbent — including use of government vehicles, public officials campaigning while in their official capacity, and use of social programs — was observed throughout the campaign.
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).
> 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...
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.
> Can you say more about why the CNE would back-calculate the raw vote counts for each candidate?
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.
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.
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.
My point is it's obvious these numbers are lazily communicated. The official report never included a total votes number. It seems highly likely that somewhere along the way someone worked backwards from the percentages to work out that final number
My point was that obviously "80%" isn't an exact number. So therefore we probably shouldn't trust that any of the other numbers are meant to be read that way
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
The Carter Center is funded by the US State Department, CIA front USAID, the UK, and the EU -- which have backed many coup attempts in Venezuela, including one right now.
It's also funded by MONARCHIES Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Qatar.
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%)
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).
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)
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.
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.
I'd love to have election observers here, but it would be political suicide for any politician to suggest it. Most Americans detest the idea that any influence from outside could improve anything here.
I don't have this feeling. As a single data point, the vast majority of my friends, both democratic and republican, are concerned about the other party pulling some tricks and would welcome as much independent transparency as possible; international observers and anything else. My 2c.
For my data point, the Republicans I know who are concerned about election meddling would consider virtually any foreign country, or the entire international community at large, to be potential conspirators against us. Russia gets a pass as long as Trump vouches for them, but he could turn that on a dime if he wanted.
Interesting. I do not think I personally know a single Republican who would be against international observers at US elections; and we did discuss the topic with a few.
No offense intended, but are you actually going off your friends' explicitly stated opinions or current media memes?
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.
> 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.
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
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
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.
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"
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.
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.
> 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.
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...
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]
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..
>Also, IGNORE anything on Twitter, Reddit, or HN (ironic ik). The lesswrong/credibledefense/zeihan types are all idiots ime. Using an "objective" tone doesn't make rubbish "objective"
Not to mention these sites are FILLED to the brim with bots. Eg. In 2013, the most "reddit-addicted" area was Eglin Air Force Base in Florida, with largest amount of activity [0]. Eglin was one of the few places used in a study for testing social media manipulation by Pentagon [1]
And not to mention the Russian/Chinese/Indian bots
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!
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 :)
> 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.
I'm not sure I understand your comment. Maduro/Chavez were Soviet/Russia backed, and have since not only wrecked the country, but have now seized permanent dictatorial power.
Most people in the US aren't even aware of the constant State Department and CIA effort to overturn democracy in Venezuela so they can appoint a US corporation friendly leader.
Columbia Uni is a hotbed for State Department types. This is clearly a concerted effort to create a narrative. The US doesn't even allow external election monitors for its own elections. At least Venezuela had some level of monitoring. The hypocrisy is abject.
There are plenty in Venezuela, all speaking Spanish to each other.
You would never ever run into one online on a predominantly English speaking website or in America/Europe in person, but you might encounter one of the upper classes.
I used to work with one of them. She complained that Chavez stole her family's second home. I presumed her family, like America, also supported the attempted military coup shortly after he was elected in 2002.
If the results are legitimate, how come independent polls were giving 30 percentage points less to Maduro than he obtained? Why were international entities not allowed to observe? And what about the multiple instances of harassment of opposition candidates?
I'm not a fan of US imperialism, but that doesn't mean you need to support any thug whose rethoric opposes the US, going so far as to deny evident reality.
They have data. You have the claim that it's propaganda, but you don't refute the data (or even the argument). That's not an effective rebuttal; it's just an attempted deflection. In fact, it shouldn't persuade anyone, even someone who is born and brought up in Venezuela.
you submitted data about Iraq, before Iraq invasion and on other countries too. now everyone knows how much truth that was. The point is whenever the country got natural resources such as oil and gas and want to use it for themselves that benefits people they face all this democracy, freedom and election rigging issues. everyone in the world can see that, except people of usa, who are brainwashed too much.
They're probably just happy to keep the site somewhat reachable during spikes like this without constantly babying it. I.e. I doubt they are interested in filtering itself as much as even less interested in alternatives.
There are so many abuse protection companies out there that don't stigmatize non-western Internet users. Also, do we really think that Columbia's IT people are that bad? I doubt a page like this would get a substantial DDoS.
Making it inaccessible to half the world, particularly much of the country that the article is about, is conceding ahead of time to the people that might want to DDoS a page like this in the first place.
> There are so many abuse protection companies out there that don't stigmatize non-western Internet users.
And there are also cases it's apparent and relevant to grandstand about, this is not one. The DDOS pages required me to go through hoops and try several devices even browsing from the US to this US site. Not typical, sure, but it is what makes the hyper charged complaints feel particularly off center.
> Also, do we really think that Columbia's IT people are that bad?
Nah, they are probably great. Likely very busy and wishing they had more staff/time like most "cost center" IT teams though.
> I doubt a page like this would get a substantial DDoS.
Any particular page is unlikely to get a DDoS but the site as a whole is likely to get them relatively frequently (disgruntled students and the like on top of the usual gamut) which is why the entire site is fronted by a CDN and given a single protection policy rather than setting everything up for each page posted.
> Making it inaccessible to half the world, particularly much of the country that the article is about, is conceding ahead of time to the people that might want to DDoS a page like this in the first place.
Again, these are probably good points on a general Cloudflare rant but posting them in this case actually makes the argument sound weaker since it's a presumed cause that doesn't seem to be the actual cause.
In an ideal world where we had extra IT time and could solve every problem and were talking about generalities of providers like Cloudflare I'd 100% agree with you. Sometimes reality gets in the way and it's not the reason we want to get fired up about or the reason we want to get fired up about isn't as easy or important to solve as we'd like it to be in the particular case though. Alternatively, if the topic were about Cloudflare instead of this particular school hosting this particular article I'd still agree as well. In this case it's none of the above - and why I say it's about not needing to baby it instead of an alternative. Similar load based protections for this site would also have kicked in with any provider, regardless our thoughts on Cloudflare.
>thats why its so strange that this was never mentioned on NPR or anywhere else that i saw. actually it was mentioned once on NPR, extremely briefly. but it was never debunked, they never published an attempt to debunk it.
I remember hearing about it more than once on NPR and "On the Media" which is basically NPR. In fact, I just did a search on NPR's website:
scrolling through that list of thousands of results, only 6 or so have an actual match for the search term (lol). that explains why i never heard about it. the rest seem to be articles that are about elections, generally related, but do not mention 2000 mules. there are no debunking in those search results, only descriptions calling the movie "widely debunked" (by who?)
i just read the one article on that list that appears to directly address the movie.
it links two articles that claim to debunk the movie, both of which are behind a pay wall. it then goes on to basically say nothing. they contact the groups that the movie accused of helping stuff ballots and those groups say "thats malarky." thats it.
someone downvotes me on a thread that has been made non-visible by the mods many days after the thread was posted and everyone stopped looking at it... how is that possible
2000 mules is utter BS from a source that specializes in such things. If there were a shred of evidence about even a single claim made by this film, the conservative super majority in the supreme court would be all over it.
Wikipedia summary:
2000 Mules is a 2022 American conspiracist[4][5][6][7] political film from right-wing political commentator Dinesh D'Souza. The film falsely[8][9][10] claims unnamed nonprofit organizations supposedly associated with the Democratic Party paid "mules" to illegally collect and deposit ballots into drop boxes in the swing states of Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin during the 2020 presidential election. D'Souza has a history of creating and spreading false conspiracy theories.[11]
Whether or not there was election fraud I don't know. All I know is I cannot trust anything the mainstream media has to say on the topic (or any other topic for that matter).
Instead of reading conspiratorial books from authors with a profit motive, ask a simple question. If there was election fraud, how come the conservative super majority in the supreme court is not all over it?
Ask for evidence first, before putting your faith in conspiracy theories, from books or movies.
If you believe in things without evidence, and then vote based on that, we're all screwed. This is the path to ideocracy.
I said I dont know if there was election fraud? I'm guessing there almost certainly was some level of election fraud, whether it was sufficient to sway the election I don't know.
You seem to be arguing that if it appears in a book, then it's defacto a conspiracy theory driven by the profit motive. (The assumption being that everyone you disagree with is greedy and manipulative whilst your motives are pure of course).
Books can outline evidence too? Maybe you should read the book first before jumping to uninformed conclusions yourself.
And anyone with eyes and a brain can see the media lies constantly (by obsfucation, cherry-picking, deflection etc).
So again, I don't know what the truth is but I certainly would never accept the media narrative on face value.
It was just planned in the US and executed with logistical support from the US with a green light given by Trump (who announced he had no "direct" role in the operation).
Thinking that the US state department controls math - and the Venezuelan vote system's integrity is above mathematics - is a new low.
A joke comes to mind: Children are giggling and misbehaving in class so the math teacher storms out: - If you do not pay attention then 80% of the class will fail the tests! Someone from back row: - Bollocks! We aren't that many in the class!
I didn't say "US state department controls math" that's a nice strawman. I said there's a reasonable explanation for the anomaly but the real reason you're seeing this is because of the State Dept's dissatisfaction with the election. I'd hope at least the crowd on HN would be smart enough not to be duped by the establishment but I guess not.
Of course you didn't say that, that was an irony you silly, you just do not understand math and draw out sensless mass manipulation bollocks from your desperation hat as a consequence. Not understanding the obvious.
As I expected, it makes no attempt to offer any evidence that the CNE has published reliable results, or that the math in TFA is faulty in any way. It simply talks about the difficulty of falsifying specific documents, and how that would make it difficult for a false report to continue when pressed (which is exactly what's happening - Maduro is pressed, and has no evidence to show). And it concludes with a pretty strong suggestion that the CNE's unverifiable tallies are, in fact, a lie.
So, I appreciate the independent confirmation that Maduro's victory is a likely sham. It's also quite reassuring to note that producing actual fake ballots would, in fact, be extremely difficult - just as you claimed! That gives me hope that Maduro will fail to convince others of his victory, since it's probably a complete fabrication.
The US can be trying to overthrow the government and said government can also be corrupt and undemocratic. The context doesn't take away from the fact that these numbers are impossible, and your comment doesn't offer any explanation for them.
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.
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%.
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.
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?
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.
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.
51.1999971, 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
3) Putting it all together:
The number of favorable outcomes is:
285 * 153 * 4368 * 330 * 5040 * 823543 = 2.51654 × 10^17
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.
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.