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Comment by jetzzz | Hacker News Reader

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

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)

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

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