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Comment by notjoemama | Hacker News Reader

I recall having read about elections in Africa and the troubles they faced. I can't find it now, but there was one particular website offering a very detailed but rigorous approach to determining the legitimacy of elections. I'll offer this article from the BBC as a stand in for the criteria (from 2016):

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.

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I have family who volunteered as international election monitors and these are the criteria they used as well. Ironic, really. I've been against electronic voting for over a decade for the same reasons.

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.

One more tell tale sign is if a particular candidate's vote count correlates to voter turnout. That is a good sign of ballot box stuffing. [i.e. a candidate gets a higher percentage of the vote in districts with higher turnout]

Couldn't it also just be one party being very "organised" in that area and getting their people out to vote?

Last year there was this HN post about people's efforts to validate results of the Nigerian elections.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35272227

> I would encourage anyone from Argentina

Surely you meant Venezuela?

Thank you! I had just been reading on another site about the US and it's "involvement" in a previous election in Argentina. Appreciate the correction. Oh my, I need to step away from the computer today. :/

7. Outliers. Like in the recent Romanian votes, in the same building there were 4 booths. On 3 of them a party got around 150 votes each, on the fourth zero. But did the authorities care? No, because it's not their party.

This criteria is erroneous as the 2020 US election proved. The UN updated its Election Observation standards, and Venezuela's election mostly passes them.

Which criterion specifically was violated during that election? A lot of people seem to think there was a delay in reporting results, but there's a differences between a reporting delay and a counting delay. Most districts report counts incrementally, so if it's taking a long time to open thousands of envelopes, and it's a close race, you get incremental updates, but no final verdict until enough are counted.

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

"so if it's taking a long time to open thousands of envelopes, and it's a close race, you get incremental updates, but no final verdict until enough are counted."

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

I would say there's a very meaningful difference between "they're still counting the results, and releasing incremental counts, and all is being watched by poll watchers" vs. "we've finished counting, but we're not releasing the results for a while, and nobody is monitoring the process". The former sounds great. The latter sounds very suspicious.

Maybe it's just an issue in how the standards are interpreted by some people.

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