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
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.
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
I agree this is at least sloppy work though. Apparently the explanation for the delay in full results is an ongoing cyber attack
Without accounting for the probability of such an event, the whole analysis isn't worth much.
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.
This is an official election release, not some PR post on their website.
It's 2024; I'd consider it a minimum level of government competency if anyone wants to be called a democratic country.
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.
> 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.