Comment by matheusmoreira | Hacker News Reader

Comment by matheusmoreira | Hacker News Reader

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> If there is evidence the election wasn't fair, you should object.

Obviously.

> But your evidence that it was unfair shouldn't be your own hurt feelings and propaganda.

Of course not. I have some real reasons for doubting the results.

Three days ago, an argentinian man streamed a video where he analyzed our election's official data set. He found that the older models of our voting machines, less thoroughly audited, displayed a clear advantage to the winning left-wing candidate, something between 8% and 15%.

After I watched this, I went to the government website and downloaded the entire election dataset and attempted to reproduce his analysis.

Then I saw the website go down for hours.

An API for data set changes notifications remained up though. I monitored that API and saw them pushing changes to the 2022 and 2018 elections datasets. I saved that data too.

Then I witnessed that API go down.

Next day, it was back up, the data was modified and there was a bullshit note on the website explaining it went down due maintenance.

Then this supreme court judge started censoring everyone who even so much as asked if he was going to investigate any of this. Last weekend I counted at least 10 influential people censored, including a doctor in economics, elected politicians and policemen. It got to the point people on Twitter got Elon Musk to look at it.

I'm very worried about this. If it's so false, why can't they just refute it? It seems to me like they're all in damage control mode. Media is pretending nothing's going on.

Did Lula also have more support in the polling in those places that used those older models? I assume those districts would be the poorer districts, and Lula did have more support among the low income, correct? I think you’re looking at correlations in data and fantasizing a causation that isn’t there.

> Did Lula also have more support in the polling in those places that used those older models?

If I understood correctly, they were compared to other machines in the same electoral zone. Each zone can have 2020 models and pre-2020 models. The older models had more votes compared to 2020 models even in the same geographical locations.

> I think you’re looking at correlations in data and fantasizing a causation that isn’t there.

Look I honestly don't know anymore. Can you help me make sense of it? It was published here:

https://brazilwasstolen.com/en/

Attempting to discuss this anywhere else, I was met with censorship and heavily biased political discourse. I know the electoral court has not made any statements regarding it, they're just censoring everything. I've never seen anything like this in my country before.

The argentinian man made a video presentation but I don't have access to it anymore due to censorship.

Depends on what you mean by same geographical locations, but that can vary a lot. If you’re looking over 100’s of kilometers, there will be both poor and wealthy districts. If you’re looking within a single city, there will be poor and wealthy districts. This really only gets informative if you’re looking at different models used in the exact same polling place and even then it could be no more than correlation for other reasons (maybe for example poorer people prefer the older machines because they’re more familiar while wealthier people prefer newer machines because it matches their iPhone).

If voting preference is at all correlated to income, and what models of voting machines used at a polling place are correlated to the wealth of that district, then you will likely find a correlation between voting machine model and voter preference, with the older/cheaper model showing a preference for the candidate more favored by poorer people.

It’s not a sign there was fraud. Did you look at whether voting on newer models showed a higher preference for Bolsonaro than the national average?

What if Bolsonaro had won and someone claimed that the newer machines were built while he was in office so they were clearly programmed to favor him? Would you accept that narrative based purely on a correlation in data?

> maybe for example poorer people prefer the older machines because they’re more familiar while wealthier people prefer newer machines because it matches their iPhone

The machines look the same to the voter and we can't choose which machine to vote on. Each citizen is assigned an electoral zone and a section within that zone. One voting machine captures the votes of every section. In my neighborhood, for example, the voting took place at a school and every classroom had a different voting machine, one for each section.

It'd be extremely suspicious if it turned out that the people voting one room away from me showed statistically significant differences from the other sections.

> Did you look at whether voting on newer models showed a higher preference for Bolsonaro than the national average?

Looks like Bolsonaro wins if only 2020 models are evaluated.

> What if Bolsonaro had won and someone claimed that the newer machines were built while he was in office so they were clearly programmed to favor him? Would you accept that narrative based purely on a correlation in data?

Clearly we'd be having the same election denialism problems we're having now...

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