Suspicious data pattern in recent Venezuelan election
statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu
statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu
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.
It'd be like feeding your English marketing copy into Google translate to Spanish and back and using that instead of the original copy.
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.
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).
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
They should report the absolute number of votes at each counting station.
A tweet, an article, or a chart on TV doesn't prove anything, as they are not official documents.
The press might summarize an election in whole numbers and maybe round up, but...that's very different from voting officials doing it.
Further research showed that last digit test wasn't very good - there are multiple obvious counters to the test.
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:
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.
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.
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.
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.
The type no one wants to even be seen trying to challenge.
Someone should run this same analysis on all the election data they can get their hands on. Who knows what might be found.
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.
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.
One wonders why they didn't even bother to do fraud slightly better.
Manipulating statistics is harder than you think.
Even if that's the case, though, there might very well be other applicable tests this would run afoul of.
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]
[0] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Logarithmic_scale.sv...
https://chance.amstat.org/2022/04/benfords-law-votes/
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/09332480.2022.20...
So now you’ve got to force each of those districts to change the numbers.
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.
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")
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.
Except, of course, if the winning party has a huge advantage which you don't think people would buy.
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
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 is not difficult at all, but it needs some basic programming skills and some basic knowledge of statistics.
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.
But for the brutal thugs running Venezuela, it is a very advanced conept.
The sheer incompetence of the Maduro government and other governments that rig election results is 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 they didn't know they would need help?
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.
[0]: https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2021/10/11/russian-...
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.
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.
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.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-37243190
Vote rigging: How to spot the tell-tale signs
1. Too many voters
2. A high turnout in specific areas
3. Large numbers of invalid votes
4. More votes than ballot papers issued
5. Results that don't match
6. Delay in announcing results
I would encourage anyone from Venezuela to look into the history of elections in Africa. It is well documented and criteria well supported.
Surely you meant Venezuela?
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.
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
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."
not relevant to the standard
Maybe it's just an issue in how the standards are interpreted by some people.
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.
It's 2024; I'd consider it a minimum level of government competency if anyone wants to be called a democratic country.
I agree this is at least sloppy work though. Apparently the explanation for the delay in full results is an ongoing cyber attack
This seems like a new and unique accusation for Venezuela
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/31/world/americas/venezuela-...
Venezuela’s terrible electoral record post Chavez.
> 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]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colectivo_(Venezuela)
The fact there were armed guards around the voting stations
https://www.as-coa.org/articles/poll-tracker-venezuelas-2024...
> 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.
[0] https://www.lapatilla.com/2024/07/15/la-guerra-de-encuestas-...
> 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
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
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.
This is an official election release, not some PR post on their website.
> 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.
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.
I don't understand your comments about the CSV: I'm saying that the raw CSV is not being distributed, only the summary statistics.
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!
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"?
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?
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.
(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.
Without accounting for the probability of such an event, the whole analysis isn't worth much.
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
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.
Like you basically can see "cells" on these graphs that appear because of falsefied results on particular voting stations:
https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2021/10/11/russian-...
In practice, it's no different from having a revolution. Might as well wear the shoe if it fits. Congrats to the generalissimo dictator!
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 was appointed by a consul, at the direction of the Senate, with the job of solving a specific problem.
The history of the dictatorship in ancient Rome, before Sulla, is really interesting, and differs quite a bit from the popular understanding: https://acoup.blog/2022/03/18/collections-the-roman-dictator...
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.
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.
Source: https://www.infobae.com/venezuela/2024/07/31/grave-denuncia-...
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.
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.
round and round we go
This seems to be tripping a lot of people up.
This means that "total votes" number was worked backwards by a third party. It's not even the CNE's fuckup
† as you can see, i am not a fluent speaker of Spanish, and i managed to work it out :)
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.
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 was all fraud.
The latter is a more interesting question. 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.
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.
https://resultadosconvzla.com/
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.
Each copy must be signed by all witnesses and also contains a digitally-signed hash of the tally at the bottom of the receipt.
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 issue here is that a bunch of the percentages imply super round numbers.
The signal isn’t that there’s a round number. It’s that they’re all round numbers.
Having read the article, I came away with similar questions and I appreciate the sibling comments clarifying.
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%
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.
The chances of those numbers occurring normally for all 3 vote counts together is just ridiculously tiny.
52.2543689%
44.2689426%
04.6345625%
But clean numbers? Much more likely.
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.
So the argument is once removed, but still compelling.
51.1999971%
44.1999989%
04.6000039%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?
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.
Yes, but the comparison is not to "any random set of numbers" it's "all other random sets of numbers"
The candidate got 52.200000% of the vote instead of any other percentage, not another specific percentage.
No, he got 51.1999971%. It’s right there in the second table of the article
Once re-computing the percentage from that number you end up with the slightly less round-looking 51.1999971%.
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.
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.
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.
Well, on this case they wouldn't. The smoking gun is their refusal to publish the counting totals, the round ratio is just some extra confirmation.
Actually it didn't add up to 106%, although the reality doesn't matter. That the mud the CIA, NED etc. throw on Venezuela is all that matters.
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 also love imagining what it must be like to read a comment like this and thinks it's political in nature.
Those were simpler times...
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.
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.
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.
What relevance does this have to gun ownership?
If you see an American walk into a school or a hotel with a gun, you know everything is going to be A-OK.
But if you ask anybody in private, nobody voted for him…
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”
Rolling ten 1s in a row does look suspicious but it’s just as likely as rolling 4846211536
I think there are two screenshots which are missing in the initial text.
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.
And voter ID required
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?
https://x.com/opablo_gm/status/1819096457850335384
and allowing the anomaly to surface
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.
https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2021/jan/08/joe-biden/...
> 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.
[0] https://www.reuters.com/world/americas/government-opposition...
> Verify you are human by completing the action below.
No thanks and fuck you to you too.
Yeah and everyone's still waiting on D's tax returns.
Promises have to be kept.
> which apparently it is never going to do
Meanwhile, the most respected pollster in the country, Hinterlaces, released an exit poll that estimated right around the actual results (54% vs 51%)
https://x.com/Hinterlaces/status/1817599369471799639
In addition, there are plenty of other international observers that back the result. Like the National Lawyers Guild
https://nlginternational.org/2024/07/press-release-national-...
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).
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
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.
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.
We don't need the Carter Foundation to tell us these results are false. They are manifestly false.
Pretty unlikely though. It isn't that hard to count votes.
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.
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.
https://www.cartercenter.org/news/pr/2024/venezuela-073024.h...
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
Or it could be fraud. Also an easy option.
People in this thread don’t know a lot of about the Venezuelan situation for how many opinions they seem to emit.
1. https://x.com/rusosnith/status/1818457492893884814?t=BtVOVhD...
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.
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.
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.
The rest of this, I don't care.
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 can guarantee Jensen Huang is not vetting each number he repeats, even if he was a skilled engineer in the past.
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
"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."
"Activists" not generally compatible with "impartial". Some coverage of the situation I found very helpful is available here: https://www.readtangle.com/venezuela-elections-explained-mad....
(Edit: Fixed link)
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?
[1]https://www.cartercenter.org/peace/democracy/observed.html
they sent 5 observers only per https://truthout.org/articles/maduro-wins-reelection-for-thi...
edit: The use of the term “opposition” seems like a bit of a tell.
"Human rights over property interests since 1937. Fighting for liberation, organizing in solidarity with radical movement leaders."
They are certainly not impartial.
0. https://www.unrefugees.org/emergencies/venezuela/#:~:text=Mo....
1. https://www.edisonresearch.com/edison-research-conducts-exit...
https://x.com/Hinterlaces/status/1817599369471799639
The exit poll that you referred to, is by EdisonResearch
EdisonResearch is based in New Jersey, and doesn't have any prior experience with exit polls in Venezuela:
https://web.archive.org/web/20180528045149/https://www.ediso...
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:
https://covertactionmagazine.com/2024/07/30/venezuelans-re-e...
I trust the US more than any foreign entity, especially in a nation as transparently corrupt as Venezuela.
1. Aggregated reports: https://resultadosconvzla.com/ 2. Raw images of the voting records: https://resultadospresidencialesvenezuela2024.com/
The second requires a Venezuelan ID as input as it will identify the specific voting record for the person.
I gathered all the records and put them in an archive: https://public.akdev.xyz/ganovzla2024.tar.gz
The voting records are present, you can feel free to analyze them.
Someone already did analyze the data here: https://x.com/rusosnith/status/1818457492893884814?t=BtVOVhD...
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
Claims
Actas digitalizadas: 24.576 (81,85%)
> 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)
There is no forecasting being done, they simply counted the votes from the voting records.
Apparently the ID of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tarek_William_Saab is publicly known ( 8.459.301 )
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)
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)
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)
There’s over 20k images so using a phone isn’t feasible. But programmatically cropping the QR code and scanning it seems doable.
Thank you for your input
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
Political parties have access to the signing key and can verify that the signature matches.
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.
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.
https://x.com/aspensmonster/status/1818859550516129814
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:
https://octodon.social/deck/@aspensmonster/11288491762219446...
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 -__-
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.
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.
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 .
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?
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.
https://www.reuters.com/world/americas/biden-lula-discuss-ve...
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"
[0] - https://www.bruegel.org/sites/default/files/wp-content/uploa...
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 :)
The acronyms were University Presses/Publishers - they tend to publish academic books and have higher standards of factualness.
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.
People who _think_ they are in the top 25%, sure.
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.
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.
[0] - https://www.csis.org/analysis/russias-possible-invasion-ukra...
[1] - https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/ukrainealert/is-putin-...
[2] - https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/ukrainealert/putins-ne...
[3] - https://www.politico.com/news/2022/01/21/baltic-allies-ukrai...
[4] - https://www.iiss.org/en/online-analysis/online-analysis/2021...
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.
Just to point for anybody reading this and trying to understand Brazil, that this is a huge simplification that may not hold for other events.
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.
LOL
Are you arguing that Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva's official public stance on the Venezuelan election has no influence?
You could have cut this out of your comment, and made your point much more effectively without the elitism.
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
[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/Blackout2015/comments/4ylml3/reddit...
In fact, just looked up these results by CNN: https://www.cnn.com/election/2020/results/president
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)
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.
https://www.albatcp.org/en/2024/07/29/cne-announced-nicolas-...
Their vote totals happen to align (almost perfectly) with round percentages
Fwiw most governments don't even report percentages. They just report totals and the percentages are added (by sites like CNN) for clarity
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
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.