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Comment by diimdeep | Hacker News Reader

Telegram created Belarus language public channel.

And posted poll to vote for new president with some clever restrictions.

Anyone can vote, but you can't choose options with candidates if your phone number is not Balarusian.

"I am not from Belarus" is only available poll option to make your vote if your phone number is not Balarusian. There is currently 736'000 votes with that option.

Telegram poll https://t.me/s/telegrambelarus/9

In Belarus there is only 7.8 million eligible voters.

Poll shows that 1,184 million choose to vote for new president Tikhanovskaya.

Only 85'000 votes for current president Lukashenko.

While official results is 80% for current, 7% for new, with 40% participation.

This is obviously mind blowing picture for citizens.

View on HN

Just in case anyone is wondering. The 'official' vote count for Thikhanovskaya is 588,622.

So regardless of how unbiased a sample it may be the Telegram poll shows over 2x as many people (or phone numbers to be exact), willing to vote for Thikhanovskaya (at the time of writing).

Use this information as you wish.

How many of these "phone numbers" aren't eligible voters though (e.g. under 18)?

Who knows. And there are tons of such effects that bias the result in every possible direction.

That's why I called upon people to use heir own judgement.

That's cool and all, except everyone in that country had 2 sim cards with 2 numbers. They don't have free long distance over there, nor are plans for cheap text+data the same plans as cheap calls. So I take this information to mean this poll was useless.

Everyone who voted could vote twice, and felons and kids voted too.

Wait, how is felons voting a bad thing?

Probably from the US, they didn't sign the human rights treaty and are a bit.. underdeveloped at that front.

On the human rights front? Compared to most of the rest of the world they are extremely developed. At least free speech is protected which is more than can be said for most common of Europe now.

Can you share some examples of large infringements on freedom of speech that happened in well developed European countries?

Given the examples of police brutality related to protests that I've seen in the US just this year I doubt you'll be able to provide any examples that are more worrying than that.

The UK’s insane libel laws are a good example.

Do you have any specific examples that show how insane they are? Because the US also has libel laws.

Simon Singh was successfully sued by the British Chiropractic association for pointing out they are quacks. (Edit to add: I just checked and he appealed a point of law successfully and then they withdrew — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Chiropractic_Associati... — but as I understand it such a case would be laughed out of a US court.)

Although I'd agree with the general point that whilst America has good theoretically human rights, the EU is better at actual rights (and in particular, rights against corporations).

But overall UK probably still ranks as treating its basic citizens with better decency than the USA due to healthcare access among other things.

You will be hard pressed to find an index that aims to measure Human Rights where the US scores better than the main European countries such as Germany, UK, France, Italy, Netherlands etc.

Press Freedom Index [1]: Nope Human Rights Scores & Human Rights Violations [2]: Nope and nope

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Press_Freedom_Index [2] https://ourworldindata.org/human-rights

> are a bit.. underdeveloped at that front

Nice euphemism. Yes, it is one the areas where America is truly a backward nation. Here's hoping we can finally correct the systemic issues undermining our representative democracy and can thus have a more progressive government come 2021.

I hope for that as well, it is quite hard to watch for everybody with a heart. In fact this empathy/pain might be the only reason I'd even bother to formulate my response..

> That's cool and all, except everyone in that country had 2 sim cards with 2 numbers.

This is not true. Some people have multiple SIM cards, but it is not even remotely close to "everyone". Based on numbers that I found, multiple SIMs have around 30% people.

Unless you’ve got some info to show that the distribution of people with 2 sims, or with kids, isn’t the same across different voting populations across the country, what you’re pointing out is irrelevant to the ratio of votes between the candidates, and only pertinent to the absolute numbers.

You raise an interesting point here:

Who has the burden of proof here? Should disparity in SIM card ownership be proven? Or the fact that they are evenly distributed be proven? Few things in life are evenly distributed, disparity is the norm!

Sure but both sides could do that right?

The problem with that approach is that it’s clearly biased towards the younger generations who are tech savvy. But it’s mostly the older people who would’ve voted for Luk.

Note, I don’t support Luk in anyway, just pointing out the bias.

Altho it does uncover the fact that the results are fabricated. But it’s not like anyone was doubting that anyways.

Come on... I don't believe this. My whole extended family below 90 is using actively some varying portion of these: Viber (most used), WhatsApp, Facebook messenger. They are mostly spread in Turkey, Bulgaria and (to a lesser extend) the rest of Europe and some in the US. Grandmas use Viber regularly to share pics of their great-grandchildren with their first cousins (other grandmas). They send holiday wishes, news etc. And my people are not better educated compared to the rest of our part of the world. Everyone is very engaged with politics (mostly for or against Erdogan).

I don't believe Belarus is any different. Yeah, younger people are probably more likely to vote in such a thing, still, I don't think the bias is huge.

I’m from Eastern Europe myself. Yes older folks have accounts, but they aren’t active users. They wouldn’t join groups. They wouldn’t vote in the app. My parents in law are a testament to that. They too have all of those apps, yet they can’t even tell the difference between WhatsApp and Viber. We ask them to call us on WhatsApp and they’ll try to call on viber or Skype and then wonder why we are not answering and if there’s anything wrong with us :)

Maybe not the 85-90 year olds, but 65-70 year olds (my parents) are very politically active.

To be fair though, Telegram users aren't exactly an unbiased sample.

2.3M voted in a poll, 59% from Belorussian phone numbers. That's 1.36 M or 17% of the eligible voter pool. 51% of these are for the secondary candidate.

This doesn't reconcile with the official numbers regardless of how you massage them.

It's good people have a way to communicate beyond the reach of the authorities ...

... but doesn't really matter how big the poll sample was if the sample was not representative - the results don't have a lot of meaning.

And it's pretty fair to say it was not representative.

In fact, you don't even need remotely that size of a sample if the sample is representative.

Polling is not about sample size, it's about the quality of the sample.

Even in the worst case scenario, where each and every opposition voter took part in the poll, and literally everyone else voted for Lukashenko, this still prpves that the true result was at least 17% for opposition, which is more than the official results claim.

Teenagers don't have phones?

Did all the eligible voters who phone-polled actually vote?

Did they poll the way they actually voted?

Some people don't have two phones?

Can we trust that telegram doesn't have a flaw in the means by which it is measured? (i.e. register again with the same SIM, or something like that?)

It's nice that there is a phone number as validation, but this doesn't 'prove' anything.

Edit: I should add, apparently people are registering photos of their votes, which don't jibe with the tally, which is probably a much better indication of problems with voting [1]

[1] https://belarus2020.org/

I can't tell if you are arguing that the original vote was less likely to be skewed than this one, or just that this one doesn't pass the highest bar that could be set for it.

I'm arguing it's an 'online poll' and subject to all sorts of possible issues. It's probably a decent indication of what seems to be some otherwise obvious fraud at the polls, it's just not 'proof' of anything really.

With these numbers, there would need to be significant effort to fraud the Telegram poll. For no real benefit other than maybe propaganda.

Whom exactly benefits from that? It would have to be a nation-state, and they weren't exactly doing much about the situation before the "election".

What is more likely: that the existing dictator and his supporters made defrauded the election to keep power or that some unknown entity defrauded an Telegram poll for not much gain.

Unless Telegram poll's system was completely broken, but you'd expect other large polls to already have revealed that.

"For no real benefit other than maybe propaganda."

Propaganda and narrative is the whole name of the game here.

It's Telegram poll, there are any number of ways it could be messed up, including very easily someone sympathetic at Telegram (though I doubt this), it has no material credibility.

It's a data point, not 'proof'.

According to the official numbers, of the 7.8 million eligible voters, 40% voted, and 7% of those voted for Tikhanovskaya. That's 218400 people.

According to the telegram poll, 1.184 million people voted for Tikhanovskaya. That's over 5x as many as according to the official numbers.

The sample size doesn't matter here, were talking absolute number. It seems pretty unlikely 5x more people (absolute number, not fraction) voted for her in a poll than in the real elections.

(I have not checked the source for the numbers, I've just assumed the above poster used the right ones)

Your numbers don't match Wikipedia [1] which indicates that there was 85% turnout, Tikhanovskaya got 10% ~600K votes. But maybe I missed something.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_Belarusian_presidential_e...

The turnout was high indeed. As for the rest of the Wikipedia article, it is woefully incorrect. I will add up-to-date information to the "Voice" section and I hope others will fix factual errors in the Death section and other parts of that article.

Bear in mind that Wikipedia's policy is use "official" sources when in doubt. According to Wikipedia, Assange is a criminal. Snowden is a traitor.

"Bear in mind that Wikipedia's policy is use "official" sources when in doubt. According to Wikipedia, Assange is a criminal. Snowden is a traitor."

Not really.

They use credible sources as far as they can find them, their numbers on Belarus look like what the international press is reporting.

Wikipedia doesn't 'think' that Assange or Snowden are anything. They have long articles detailing their history, and possibly what some others might think.

Sample size is not everything "Literary Digest poll was also one of the largest and most expensive polls ever conducted, with a sample size of around 2.4 million people" The large size by itself does not guarantee correctness https://www.math.upenn.edu/~deturck/m170/wk4/lecture/case1.h...

> The large size by itself does not guarantee correctness

That's true for "reasonable" poll sizes. As your poll size increases past a certain point, it does begin to guarantee correctness.

An election is a poll with the size of all eligible voters.

Yeah I think Telegram, like Whatsapp, is adopted broadly enough not to bias too heavily in one direction. Definitely not 90%, and especially not if that “bias” matches the word on the street.

Telegram? 5% of the world uses Telegram. And I bet the 50+ age demographic is heavily underrepresented in that subset. Significant sample bias shows up in US polling using mediums that are exponentially more widespread.

Nonetheless, I don't doubt the validity of these particular results, because I think we have enough corroborating evidence. We don't have to justify the rigorousness of a Telegram poll to come to that same conclusion.

People in different parts of the world differ HUGELY in what instant-messaging communications platform they use.

For instance people in the US still use text-messaging to a significant percentage. That's hard for me to believe as well.

It's no use looking at Telegram's world usage, that's for sure.

Maybe Telegram is popular in Belarus, but there is one thing that is true all over the world: rates of technology literacy and access is lower for the old/poor/rural.

Biases are irrelevant. If you look a the numbers, there are more people saying they voted for the opposition on the Telegram pool than votes on the official pool. About 5 times as many.

Exactly, this is impossible to reconcile. Either there has been vote fraud or this people didn't actually go to the poll station. Or people can vote more than once.

What about the people under 18 who I assume could take the poll and also people who didn't go to vote but took a few seconds to take the poll on Telegram?

Also what about all the babushkas who most likely voted for Lukashenko but don't have a smartphone?

This is not to say that more people didn't vote for the opposition than the official numbers state. But Lukashenko still could have won.

We'll say Belarus has 1m people that are old enough to both have a smart phone and be under the legal voting age (and that's being extremely gracious). Unless you're saying literally EVERY ONE OF THEM voted in this poll AND voted for the opposition, there are STILL more people of voting age in the telegram poll who voted for the opposition than "officially" voted for the opposition. The numbers are nearly impossible to believe unless Telegram is intentionally fudging the numbers.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Belarus

This is certainly damning data, but having a telephone in Belarus does not necessarily mean that person voted in the prior election. This is good evidence, but not a mathematical proof.

The people can lie to Telegram, Telegram can lie, somebody can attack the communications, somebody can attack the telephones, somebody can impersonate the numbers, all the Telegram voters can be from those 60% that didn't vote...

There are many ways that could happen. But it's pretty good evidence to add to the context, and the pile of evidence was already quite big.

Indeed.

"Official" election results were giving Tsikhanoyskaya around half a million votes while over 1 million Telegram users with Belarusian phone numbers already said that they voted for her.

Se here https://t.me/telegrambelarus/9

"An election is a poll with the size of all eligible voters."

Not really though.

An election is ostensibly 'perfect sample of the electorate' (assuming everyone voted), which is what makes it 'good'.

It's very easy to get a 'very large sample size' that is still 'very inaccurate'.

In this case, we're talking about potential numbers larger than literal voters, which makes it interesting - but the sample size again is not the issues if we're looking at a 'poll'.

> As your poll size increases past a certain point, it does begin to guarantee correctness.

> An election is a poll with the size of all eligible voters.

I think you're oversimplifying the situation. Clearly, sample size alone doesn't have that much of a correctness guarantee, or according to your own statement, we'd be able to trust the official results.

> Clearly, sample size alone doesn't have that much of a correctness guarantee, or according to your own statement, we'd be able to trust the official results.

People are not complaining because the election is a biased sample of the population (not possible because by definition an election is open to all eligible voters).

People are complaining because they believe the government is not truthfully reporting the actual election results.

Good polling technique cannot mitigate fraud.

Yes, this is the point I am making. Sample size is but one of many factors that influence the reliability of a poll, and it is not the only consideration for good polling technique. A large sample does not mitigate those factors.

If there is an issue with the underlying polling technique, making the sample larger does not guarantee more correctness. You simply end up with a larger set of bad data.

So what it it wasn't random, but captured 90% of the population?

Where are you seeing 90%?

The poll itself says 59% of the 2.3m respondents were people who voted in the election.

That's 1.4m people, which is 15% of their population and 21% of their eligible voting population.

Forget the percentage - there are more people who said they voted for the second-place contender than the second-place contender's official vote count.

Yes, clearly the evidence demonstrates the election results are less than trustworthy.

But that’s not what I was taking issue with. Above, I was disputing the claim that a large sample size “guarantees correctness”

Likely, neither this Telegram poll nor the election are statistically sound in their results, for different reasons.

I am not saying that the Telegram poll has to be statistically sound to be valuable evidence.

Even if the sample size is the same size as the population?

1. Possibly, if they are different populations.

2. This sample in the Telegram poll is ~20% the number of voters in Belarus.

What we have here is a Sample, and in statistics (of which Polling is a discipline) you require a Randomized Sample of the Population before you can draw any meaningful conclusions.

Telegram users are not going to pass any "Randomness" scrutiny. For all we know, Telegram User A asks Telegram User B to take the poll, etc. That's not random, and can introduce all sorts of statistical bias.

You’re ignoring the finite population and the actual numbers involved.

It is simultaneously possible for the results to have statistical issues while also being good enough to provide utility as evidence for drawing some conclusions. You can both be right.

Indeed

What does that have to do with the fact that the number of telegram users that voted for the opposition candidate exceeds the official number of voters that voted for the opposition candidate?

Phone number is not an unique identifier. There are plenty of people who use multiple phone numbers.

While I don't believe in Belarus official results, that Telegram evidence is not a real evidence. It's just a hint.

I very highly doubt around double the amount of ”official” voters would have a second belarussian number.

Also, they have to decide to actually use that second number to cheat in a Telegram poll significantly more often than people of the other party.

Otherwise you can only draw your error bars equally in both ways at once, and then they need to be pretty large before the numbers stop saying what they clearly are saying.

What kind of a statistical bias would explain having 1 million Belariusian phone numbers claiming having voted for a candidate, that officially received around 0.5 million votes total?

Adulthood necessary to vote could be one?

Especially if your poll is showing extremely lopsided results.

If a poll shows 80% for candidate A, you’d only need to hit 62.5% of the population to guarantee that candidate A would hit 50% of the vote even if the remaining 47.5% voted for other candidates.

> Sample size is not everything "Literary Digest poll was also one of the largest and most expensive polls ever conducted, with a sample size of around 2.4 million people" The large size by itself does not guarantee correctness https://www.math.upenn.edu/~deturck/m170/wk4/lecture/case1.h...

But isn't that really only the case when you're trying to use statistical inference to generalize from a sample? It seems like the right way to think about this poll is as a direct measurement of a floor of support for the challenger (others have said that is >2x the her official vote count), and the right statistical question is to ask is what's the probability that the official results are true given that floor.

People who can vote officially and telegram accounts are not the same thing. I'm sure we even teenagers could have found multiple phone numbers to vote in the telegram poll.

We can't exclude the possibility that If I were a foreign power with a military budget measured in trillions then the telegram poll would say exactly what I wanted it to say.

When a sample is greater than the census, you’ve got a problem.

With the census.

Same story when people predicted Hillary’s chances 99.9% based of Twitter polls. Your sample selection gives misleading predictions too easily.

That is not what the OP is saying. They are indicating _not_ that the oppo party would win, but that the party in power is clearly lying about the results. If they are lying, then that calls for a new election.

Official election results give Tikhanovskaya 500k votes, Telegram poll - 1M votes, 2x more.

Ah I see, so there's no extrapolation involved, only the raw numbers.

We don't know how many people who voted in the Telegram poll actually voted. Maybe only a quarter of the people in the Telegram poll actually voted.

Its possible that some of the people in the Telegram poll are not eligible to vote (due to age or whatever).

There could be other issues like people changing who they voted for in the election after previously voting in Telegram.

It's a fair point, not sure why there are downvotes. I still think it's extremely likely that the official numbers are bogus but you can't really accept the Telegram numbers as truth either.

"Official" figures have no ground in the reality. A crowdfunded campaign to check election results just produced a report, details are published in https://partizan-results.com/

People behind this campaign are starting to reveal their names at last. I know personally one of them.

My network says others are highly respectable as well.

Well, maybe that's simple enough to explain. Maybe scared citizens don't want to go and publicly vote for fear they're going to get the shit kicked out of them?

There is no need to invent scared citizens when corrupt election officials suffice.

From what I've seen of reporting in Belarus, nobody watched over the shoulder as people filled in their ballots. It's still a secret who any specific individual voted for (unless they choose to tell you).

Right, although the telegram results are still interesting enough to warrant a second look at the election from interested third parties (the media if that is free in Belarus, or the UN)

There is no faith that the official polls use less bias data, or any data, really.

There is no faith that the Telegram polls use less bias data, or any data, really.

> Telegram users aren't exactly an unbiased sample

It's not quite a Telegram problem, voters in a protest poll are not an unbiased sample. This is why elections where one side denies the legitimacy of an election "invalid," in the "we all accept the results" sense.

Call it it petition, protest or public declaration. In that regard,the numbers are meaningful.

Just keep in mind that the few non-governmental election monitors all had Lukashenko with less than 20% of the vote. This is not an isolated result.

It's like using Reddit upvotes for a measure of American politics.

They have a massive audience but Ron Paul and Bernie still weren't anywhere near the presidency.

Wow. For context, there are less than 10M people total in Belarus, and ~16% of the population is under age 15. In order for the numbers to tally, the protests would necessarily have to be made up (almost) entirely of children.

https://www.indexmundi.com/belarus/demographics_profile.html

"Poll shows that 1,184 million choose to vote for new president Tikhanovskaya."

It is possible that Telegram is being impartial and providing more honest statistics wrt. what the citizens want. But it's also the case the results are unverifiable data broadcasted from Telegram's server over TLS-equivalent connection. MITM attack of client-server encryption, as well as compromise of the server broadcasting the results allow the attacker to alter the voting results. People acting on those results will allow Telegram to bypass democratic processes. Not saying Belarus is a democracy, but if this sets a precedent it will turn Telegram into a tool of political power, and power, as always, will corrupt. Even if Durov's team is being fair and honest (which I find unlikely considering Durov is yet another Russian oligarch who made their money spying on VKontakte users), they're also useful fools creating yet another architecture with centralized control over user data.

Russian oligarch is very specific term[1], due to his age, Durov is missed time frame by 20 years to become one. Durov is Internet entrepreneur that is forced to become political expat, that's on the opposite spectrum from russian oligarch, like self made tech entrepreneur vs oil magnate trough inheritance.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_oligarch

why would that blow someone's mind? Obviously if you're on an "anti" communication channel with a revolutionary mindset of course the majority will be overwhelmingly high against the dictator. That's by definition what they are revolting against.

Even allowing for the fact some Belarusians have multiple mobile phone numbers, as do some people who aren't eligible to vote for perfectly normal reasons, it's quite telling that somebody polled twice as many votes on a communication channel compared with the official 'count'.

What about those who are underage? There's a surely a large internet-savy base with phone numbers who would otherwise be unable to vote.

Underage people and foreigners are in the 'unable to vote for perfectly normal reasons' bracket. Extrapolating from census figures, you'd need pretty much every single person in the 13-17 age range to vote Tikhanovskaya to make up the disparity between Telegram and official tallies though. And if she got literally every teenager in the country to register a protest vote on a web app, there's a sneaking suspicion she might actually have got more than her 10% official tally with the adults too...

Forget percentages, even the raw numbers show a mismatch between official and Telegram results.

Sounds like a great INFOOP opportunity by a foreign power to further sow discontent.

Is it possible to consider that either Telegram has a vested interest on it or someone can easily obtain a telephone number in Belarus and hack the results?

This is great, maybe we can use Telegram for the actual election, because if we're absolutely sure that this poll is clean and we use it to ask for a new election, why don't we just take the results officially? If we don't, well, maybe we should make no assumptions about the results either.

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