Hacker News Reader

Comment by marcosdumay | Hacker News Reader

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.

View on HN

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.

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com