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Comment by aaplok | Hacker News Reader

In light of recent analyses of suspicious elections (Iran, Russia, Venezuela), it seems harder than it sounds to avoid discernible patterns.

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.

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> 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.

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.

Yup. It’s a special kind of power that can flat out rig an election and have opponents ‘fall out of windows’ with no repercussions.

The type no one wants to even be seen trying to challenge.

>It would be interesting to look for patterns in a (presumably) fair election like the recent British one for comparison.

Someone should run this same analysis on all the election data they can get their hands on. Who knows what might be found.

There were some pretty shit analysises of the 2020 US elections that Matt Parker covered with videos like "Why do Biden's votes not follow Benford's law?"[1] and "Why was Biden's win calculated to be 1 in 1,000,000,000,000,000?"[2].

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.

[1]: https://youtu.be/etx0k1nLn78

[2]: https://youtu.be/ua5aOFi-DKs

Those are really well done, not to mention hilarious. Thanks for sharing.

If you were forced against your will to aid in this type of fraud, might you not intentionally include a subtle error in your work that reveals its illegitimacy to a careful observer?

Gun to my head? No.

E. Goldstein wins with 51.2HELPIMTRAPPEDINANELECTIONRIGGINGBUNKER% of the vote!

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.

If have thought it more likely that the stress would cause an accidental subtle error.

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