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Comment by olalonde | Hacker News Reader

Unlikely, the person making the announcement was an official from the national electoral council (Consejo Nacional Electoral). There's no reason the national electoral council wouldn't have access to the exact counts and would have to work their way backwards from percentages.

Source: https://x.com/yvangil/status/1817787106237743565

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You say 'unlikely'. But the real question is 'how likely'.

Without accounting for the probability of such an event, the whole analysis isn't worth much.

Yes but that guy certainly didn't tally the votes himself, someone gave him the numbers (and someone else gave him those numbers). It's plausible that in some step only the (rounded) percentages and overall total were given and then someone downstream imputed the counts.

It's possible but not very plausible. Why would the official organization charged with overseeing the elections knowingly report inaccurate numbers when it has access to the accurate numbers?

Because maybe they didn't have direct access to the original numbers? You can't understand that some consumer of the data might not get the original CSV only some summary?

A summary that includes the exact number of votes cast and the percent for each candidate but not the breakdown by candidate?

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.

Yes, the percentages are the most important number, the number everyone is interested in. The next most important number is the voter turnout. You can verify this by looking at the newspaper headlines of any election. Again unless you are an electioneer no one cares about the raw numbers so it would not be surprising that only the percentages and total are communicated to the public relations department.

I don't understand your comments about the CSV: I'm saying that the raw CSV is not being distributed, only the summary statistics.

> Yes, the percentages are the most important number, the number everyone is interested in.

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!

My recollection is that turnout is usually quoted in both percentage and absolute numbers but quoting it as a percentage requires external data (population demographics) which presumably isn't in the electioneering department.

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"?

Because I've literally never seen percentages without tallies reported in any context. It's apparently so uncommon that your hypothetical person who created these clearly-not-real numbers felt the need to go backfill them.

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?

Pretty much every headline number does not show tallies (it's impossible to fit in a headline in any case). It's often included in a more detailed analysis further in an article or segment which the vast majority of people don't read. My point is that they are obviously far less important numbers and not the "headline" numbers. So one person (the supplier) could easily have decided (or misunderstood that) the detailed numbers were not required and another person (the consumer) decided that they needed or wanted them because they are conventionally or should be reported.

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.

It is inconceivable to me that in a competently-run real election, you would not transfer actual vote tallies at any point in the (internal) process. This is true for intermediate results just like it is true for final results. If percentages are calculated at all, it is to gain insight into your local results.

(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.

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