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.
This is not correct since you can claim the above for any number of votes actually obtained (if you asked someone to pick a number from 1 to 10 million, any number the person picks (assuming iid picks) will be by definition 10^-7).
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.
My favourite part of my math education, solutions were always nice.
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:
> Oh, it's sqrt(2), I probably didn't make an error in the calculation
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.
Except in the real world we are allowed to offload the computation to a computer and have more time to double check things. Nice solutions are necessary due to time and resource constraints that exist within an educational setting.
You are right that it is unlikely that one candidate gets the number of votes that exactly matches a certain percentage with one decimal (1:10.000 as per the source article).
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.
The results we're discussing were read live by the president of the Venezuelan electoral authority. It is possible that they... simply read the wrong results? Like an internal estimate rather than the real numbers? But that is a wild mistake for the electoral authority to make.
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.
Not difficult at all. Just pick the approximate numbers you want and then introduce a random error of a few percent. (Normal, uniform, doesn't really matter). This is also not hard for statistics experts to detect, but it's much harder to prove (aka you've got plausible deniability).
One wonders why they didn't even bother to do fraud slightly better.
Generate 10,058,744 random floating numbers from [0,1), and count how many will fall into each of the intervals: [0, 0.522), [0.522, 0.522+0.442), or [0.522+0.442, 1). You can do it with less calculations if you know how to generate random numbers from binomial distribution. Then you should calculate percentages from these three numbers just to be sure they are right.
It is not difficult at all, but it needs some basic programming skills and some basic knowledge of statistics.
Hard. Naively, run the election, use real vote counts, claim that you're the one that got more.
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
Actually think this is a fascinating question, although perhaps for different reasons within whatever reasons might have led you to ask it.
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.
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.
Depends on if you're in on it with the forgers or if you're against it but being forced to do it. It's the perfect clue to leave in, as its intention is plausibly deniable and you can tip statisticians to uncover the fraud.
You just need to run some Monte Carlo sims where the priors are your desired rates, then use this results to alter the real numbers. It's as random as it gets.
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")
Thanks. Note to self: Next time I want to rig election results, generate a random integer between 54.2% and 54.3% of the vote and count it as the winner's vote, subtract from total pool, wash rinse repeat.
When I try to explain the issue, it boils down to this : the results look like they have been cooked. And the probability of that hapening by chance is 1 in 100 million.
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.
This isn't a digit test, though—the giveaway here isn't a problem with the last digit (or any single digit), the giveaway is that the vote tallies reported exactly match what you would arrive at if you attempted to derive them from nice round 3-digit percentages.
Many instances of numerical manipulations end up being discovered because the cheater didn't understand math well enough to hide their tracks correctly.
I have always called the argument that someone couldn't have possibly done it because it would be stupid to have done so the "Connie Defense" after a woman who tried to assert same before I picked her up and put her out of the house like Fred Flinstones cat.
This was after she was caught driving without a license while speeding and smoking weed in a state where it was still illegal.
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):
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]
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
To play the devil's advocate: It's possible that the person making the announcement was only given the rounded percentages and the total number of votes, and then "created" the number of votes per candidate to fit to the format of the announcement. That would be sloppy, but not malicious.
It's technically possible that that was not their weed and their meth in their pants because those were not their pants. However when they have a mile-long rap sheet for selling drugs, it weakens their argument a bit.
What's the mile long rap sheet though? The group that's alleging fraud (AltaVista) is using images of printed receipts from different voting places as a sample to estimate the final vote. That group also said it's same technique resulted in election outcomes that are within 2 points or less of the announced outcome for 2021, 2018, and 2015.
This seems like a new and unique accusation for Venezuela
True in general, but here "the President of the National Electoral Commission announced the winner". Sloppy in this situation equals malicious. And I wonder who gave the president the numbers to calculate with. ; )
Sure, and it's only "80%" (another sloppy-looking number) of the count, but these numbers are still useful in that it'd be an insurmountable lead. Independent decision desks don't wait for exact final tallies to call a race. It will likely take weeks for every single vote to be fully counted.
I agree this is at least sloppy work though. Apparently the explanation for the delay in full results is an ongoing cyber attack
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.
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.
That would mean that the group that released the percentage, and thus calculated it, was a different group than the one that released the raw numbers. That doesn't seem likely since they seem to be coming from the same gov't body.
This is an official election release, not some PR post on their website.
In my country (Korea) they broadcast vote counts, per district, in real time as data pours in from all over the country. It's a big entertainment going on for the whole night. And you can log onto the website of the office of the election commission and see raw numbers by each voting district.
It's 2024; I'd consider it a minimum level of government competency if anyone wants to be called a democratic country.
I'd say it's extremely common to announce numbers of votes both as they come in and when the final total is known. Here in the US major news networks (ABC, CNN, Fox, 270towin, and others) all have live maps that show the total number of votes + total percentages during the voting period. They usually also let you hover over the states/counties to see the percentages and votes for the particular area.
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.
The article has been updated to mention this theory
> 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.
I hope you're right. If there's anything more insulting than having an election tampered with, it's having it tampered with... poorly. Like, you couldn't even bother to lie precisely?
The point of the article which I missed: the issue here is that the vote totals are very close to their 0.1% place roundings after multiplying the total votes times the percentages, suggesting that the vote totals were simply faked by taking the total votes and multiplying them by percentages precise only to the 0.1% place.
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
I had pulled an all-nighter (writing a grant proposal actually) and was steaming mad reading this and had to scroll a bit. May be a comment like this will help someone else out who might be confused.
> the issue here is that the vote totals are very close to their 0.1% place roundings after multiplying the total votes times the percentages
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.
BTW when actual raw electoral data is available it's possible to create infographics that far easier to read. Like there been Shpilkin graphs for every major Russia elections. When cental authorities trying to match specific number in percent of votes it's always obvious on scale.
Like you basically can see "cells" on these graphs that appear because of falsefied results on particular voting stations:
This reminds me of the story how the height of Mt. Everest was first measured at exactly 29,000 feet. The surveyor’s boss at the time added two feet thinking no one would trust such an exact number.
This should remind us that "One Person, One Vote" can all too easily slip into "One Person, One Vote, One Time." For Venezuela that one time was in ~1998.
No, that's a meta-democratic vote, not a democratic vote. Many constitutions disqualify insurgents and revolutionaries from running for office for this reason. At a minimum you'd have to follow the super-majority process for amending the constitution if there is one.
In practice, it's no different from having a revolution. Might as well wear the shoe if it fits. Congrats to the generalissimo dictator!
Pure democracies will ALWAYS vote themselves into dictatorships. That is why Constitutional Republics that use representation are more long-term stable.
Yesterday there were news regarding 4 misterious flights from Cuba to Venezuela. Apparently a technical chinese team went there to rig the legitimate results, hence the delay to reveal them. Obviously unverifiable but I wouldn't be surprised to be true.
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.
It's clear Maduro is running a near dictatorship and will do anything to keep power. The country is doing absolutely horribly, all due to mismanagement. Even with proof of fraud, he will pull whatever is needed to avoid stepping down at this point, as is the case with all autocrats.
When a country start building statues in every major city of the current running government leader, you are already past _near dictatorship_. This is full cult of personality and dictatorship bullshit.
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.
No one has yet to post the actual official statement by the CNE. It doesn't seem too unlikely that they had a total vote count as well as the percentages for each candidate and released those. It feels like people are jumping to some major conclusions in this thread
cause they did not release any official statement, they only read those numbers on national TV and 8 hours later they made maduro sign the papers as a winners.
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's all nice looking for suspicious patterns but a bit pointless when the election is very obviously rigged (107% of votes counted etc) and Maduro is like I control the army what you going to do about it?
The latter is a more interesting question. There must be some way to get vote rigging dictators out?
> 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.
I don't know really but the US was able to go arrest Noriega without too much grief and Britain where I live used to take over loads of countries for it's empire before that became politically incorrect. Maybe we could have some modified version limited to support a countries peoples against illegitimate rulers on a kick them out, hold elections then leave basis?
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.
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.
How do the witnesses know how people voted? I can't find sources saying whether Venezuela has as secret ballot or not, but I assume so otherwise it would be all over the news
Forgive me if this is a dumb question, but isn't every vote total extremely unlikely if you make it precise to the exact number of votes? Like the chances of getting n+1, n+2... votes is roughly the same probability.
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 question was "How likely is it that the votes worked out so well that they were basically even 1/10 percentages and not ugly numbers?"
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%
exactly? With all of those clean 0s? Very low.
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.
If the lottery administrator's daughter wins the lottery, he may say "no, no - don't you see, her probability of getting the winning numbers is exactly the same as anyone else's!"
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.
The other commenters point at the explanation but don't explain it rigorously IMO. Here's how I'd say it.
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.
Yeah, they just forgot to report 59.869280705993% instead of 60%. They would have got away with it too, if it weren't for those cunning statisticians. They just forgot to come up with a random, credible number. Happens to the best of us I guess.
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.
The second half of the article answers this very question.
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?
I've tried to explain this a couple of times, but I keep falling back on the calculations used to show the problem (that it's not the numbers themselves, but the pattern). This comment nailed it with simply "It's that they're all round numbers". I've always been terrible at rephrasing things to make stronger points in a more concise way. Thanks! :D
I think you are correct, but that's missing the point of the article's content. I'm just a programmer, not a math expert, but I believe these statements are accurate.
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.
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 love trying to imagine what it's like being inside the mind of somebody who can entertain this kind of material (assumptions based on statistics, alone), while simultaneously believing that the 2020 US presidential election was sound and secure.
I also love imagining what it must be like to read a comment like this and thinks it's political in nature.
It's disingenuous to say discussion about election fraud isn't political in nature, what else could it be? I dismissed the 2020 US election fraud claims without looking into them, but I've seen it brought up a few times in this thread and people on HN usually hold reasonable views. After some research I've found nothing remotely convincing.
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.
It's not possible to point out the evidence any longer - those days are over. There was a public plan, by the government and the host of big tech companies that are in bed with that government (In-Q-Tel, for example, is not some big secret), to silence anyone discussing it. You wouldn't here much about this, because of this.
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.
Venezuela went from the richest country in South America to one where the average citizen lost 17lbs in a year. Once your economy looks like that, the slightest hint of armed unrest could collapse the government. The only reason Maduro stayed in power was because he could have the military shoot into unarmed crowds with no repercussions.
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.
Is it possible some idiot was given the percentages, the total votes, and then decided they could just estimate the breakdown from the percentages for the announcement? Assuming stupidity before malice.
We all mock these third rate dictatorship issues, but then in America we allow voting without ID or any sorts of protection at all... Basically asking people to commit fraud.
misleading article, pretending this is some kind of scientific evidence of fraud without mentioning other possible explanations.
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”
It could be someone having the total and percentages, and "reconstructing" the individual vote counts. Or, that's what they would say anyway in response to this.
I used to think that there’s something terribly embarrassing about watching people like these lying in such a pathetically obvious way. Like catching my 5 year old in a lie. But I think I’m realizing that it simply doesn’t matter. They just need the “forged document” to hold up in their hands. Not to survive scrutiny.
I get this due to a browser extension I have (in my case it is the extension FreeTree, but chances are you aren't using that). Maybe try disabling all extensions and try the captcha again?
In the US we have known-flawed closed-source machines where the company executives that make them also make clearly political statements that favor the side that used to be against those machines.
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.
How do you ensure one person one vote without giving an authority the sole power of creating keys? How do you prevent them creating additional ones?
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?
I find it quite amusing to watch people declare the Venezuela election stolen by the very same metrics they loudly proclaimed meant absolutely nothing in the 2020 US elections. At this point, it's not a hard bet to think I'll have more mirth coming my way in November.
There was a lot more light shone on the US elections. Over 60 cases were brought by Trump supporters, many before Republican judges, some of whome were even Trump appointees. All fraud cases were dismissed out of hand for lack of evidence. The only case not dismissed was about time allowed to vote.
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.
The most important part of the article is buried in the PS:es:
> 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.
More on this. The Carter Foundation, the only impartial observers who were in Venezuela for the election, and who previously defended Venezuela's election system following Chavez's 2004 win, has called on Maduro's government to release local vote tallies, which apparently it is never going to do: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/31/world/americas/venezuela-...
Maduro just responded to a journalist from the Washington Post that they will not be able to show the local vote tallies now because, at this moment, the National Electoral Council is in “a cyber battle never seen before.”
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
Exactly. You don't need advanced math. You only need to see the tallies for every voting center and make sum.
I believe the opposition has already done this. The fact that the government has not done it shows that they just don't have the numbers.
The issue in this post has nothing to do with any of the outside election observers. You could replace the Carter Foundation with the CIA itself and you'd still be left with the same problem, which is that these vote counts are fictitious.
The Carter Foundation stood up to the US govt in 2004, when they validated Chavez's win. Maybe they became un-impartial since then. But you're assuming a lot.
I'd never heard of the National Lawyer's Guild. According to Wikipedia:
"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."
The numerical problem does not hinge on the reputability of any particular observer organization, though. You can just verify it on a calculator yourself!
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 .
I'm not sure I understand this battle-of-experts thing happening here. The Venezuelan authorities released the vote totals. They work out to exactly 51.2% vs 44.2%. That did not happen in the real world. Could not have.
We don't need the Carter Foundation to tell us these results are false. They are manifestly false.
Anyone who calls this election fair is not impartial. The scale of the fraud is enormous and undeniable.
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?
This is a strangely belligerent statement from an organization tasked with being impartial observers. I don’t know what to make of it, but it seems very odd.
edit: The use of the term “opposition” seems like a bit of a tell.
I can't find much about the Carter Foundation, but Edison Polling—the organization that released the exit poll that showed the opposition winning— does have a long history of criticism for being US-backed and consistently producing results that favor US interests.
Meanwhile, the most respected pollster in the country, Hinterlaces, released an exit poll that estimated right around the actual results (54% vs 51%)
This is a bit of an aside, but as a geopolitical news junkie, what I keep searching on Google News is: Venezuela election Lula
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.
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"
Twitter (Alperovitch / Silverado Policy, someone influential enough to be sanctioned by Russian gov.) and HN is what surfaced the Russian invasion months before it happened. No academic book or Axios or Politico article was there to inform you conclusively that early. Lesswrong and HN were also much earlier (Jan '20) to the Covid epidemic, a major geopol issue, than your sources.
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.
> As someone who worked in the space, stop. It's a waste of time as you're not in a position to make changes
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.
Why should they stop if this is something they enjoy reading and learning about? Why should they want to or have to affect changes personally? I fail to understand the last part..
>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"
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
Axios is easy, butdo you mind expanding the acronyms to true newbs in the field? :)
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 :)
> 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,
You could have cut this out of your comment, and made your point much more effectively without the elitism.
I'm not sure I understand your comment. Maduro/Chavez were Soviet/Russia backed, and have since not only wrecked the country, but have now seized permanent dictatorial power.
Most people in the US aren't even aware of the constant State Department and CIA effort to overturn democracy in Venezuela so they can appoint a US corporation friendly leader.
Columbia Uni is a hotbed for State Department types. This is clearly a concerted effort to create a narrative. The US doesn't even allow external election monitors for its own elections. At least Venezuela had some level of monitoring. The hypocrisy is abject.
There are plenty in Venezuela, all speaking Spanish to each other.
You would never ever run into one online on a predominantly English speaking website or in America/Europe in person, but you might encounter one of the upper classes.
I used to work with one of them. She complained that Chavez stole her family's second home. I presumed her family, like America, also supported the attempted military coup shortly after he was elected in 2002.
If the results are legitimate, how come independent polls were giving 30 percentage points less to Maduro than he obtained? Why were international entities not allowed to observe? And what about the multiple instances of harassment of opposition candidates?
I'm not a fan of US imperialism, but that doesn't mean you need to support any thug whose rethoric opposes the US, going so far as to deny evident reality.
They have data. You have the claim that it's propaganda, but you don't refute the data (or even the argument). That's not an effective rebuttal; it's just an attempted deflection. In fact, it shouldn't persuade anyone, even someone who is born and brought up in Venezuela.
you submitted data about Iraq, before Iraq invasion and on other countries too. now everyone knows how much truth that was. The point is whenever the country got natural resources such as oil and gas and want to use it for themselves that benefits people they face all this democracy, freedom and election rigging issues. everyone in the world can see that, except people of usa, who are brainwashed too much.
They're probably just happy to keep the site somewhat reachable during spikes like this without constantly babying it. I.e. I doubt they are interested in filtering itself as much as even less interested in alternatives.
There are so many abuse protection companies out there that don't stigmatize non-western Internet users. Also, do we really think that Columbia's IT people are that bad? I doubt a page like this would get a substantial DDoS.
Making it inaccessible to half the world, particularly much of the country that the article is about, is conceding ahead of time to the people that might want to DDoS a page like this in the first place.
>thats why its so strange that this was never mentioned on NPR or anywhere else that i saw. actually it was mentioned once on NPR, extremely briefly. but it was never debunked, they never published an attempt to debunk it.
I remember hearing about it more than once on NPR and "On the Media" which is basically NPR. In fact, I just did a search on NPR's website:
scrolling through that list of thousands of results, only 6 or so have an actual match for the search term (lol). that explains why i never heard about it. the rest seem to be articles that are about elections, generally related, but do not mention 2000 mules. there are no debunking in those search results, only descriptions calling the movie "widely debunked" (by who?)
i just read the one article on that list that appears to directly address the movie.
it links two articles that claim to debunk the movie, both of which are behind a pay wall. it then goes on to basically say nothing. they contact the groups that the movie accused of helping stuff ballots and those groups say "thats malarky." thats it.
2000 mules is utter BS from a source that specializes in such things. If there were a shred of evidence about even a single claim made by this film, the conservative super majority in the supreme court would be all over it.
Wikipedia summary:
2000 Mules is a 2022 American conspiracist[4][5][6][7] political film from right-wing political commentator Dinesh D'Souza. The film falsely[8][9][10] claims unnamed nonprofit organizations supposedly associated with the Democratic Party paid "mules" to illegally collect and deposit ballots into drop boxes in the swing states of Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin during the 2020 presidential election. D'Souza has a history of creating and spreading false conspiracy theories.[11]
Whether or not there was election fraud I don't know. All I know is I cannot trust anything the mainstream media has to say on the topic (or any other topic for that matter).
Instead of reading conspiratorial books from authors with a profit motive, ask a simple question. If there was election fraud, how come the conservative super majority in the supreme court is not all over it?
Ask for evidence first, before putting your faith in conspiracy theories, from books or movies.
If you believe in things without evidence, and then vote based on that, we're all screwed. This is the path to ideocracy.
It was just planned in the US and executed with logistical support from the US with a green light given by Trump (who announced he had no "direct" role in the operation).
Thinking that the US state department controls math - and the Venezuelan vote system's integrity is above mathematics - is a new low.
A joke comes to mind: Children are giggling and misbehaving in class so the math teacher storms out: - If you do not pay attention then 80% of the class will fail the tests! Someone from back row: - Bollocks! We aren't that many in the class!
I didn't say "US state department controls math" that's a nice strawman. I said there's a reasonable explanation for the anomaly but the real reason you're seeing this is because of the State Dept's dissatisfaction with the election. I'd hope at least the crowd on HN would be smart enough not to be duped by the establishment but I guess not.
The US can be trying to overthrow the government and said government can also be corrupt and undemocratic. The context doesn't take away from the fact that these numbers are impossible, and your comment doesn't offer any explanation for them.
Im venezuelan and can assure you there is not a single venezuelan not talking about this 24/7 right now. And yes the international atenttion helps. Democracies are fragile and you should be invested in keeping them alive even outside of the US.
Aren't percentages typically rounded? I don't see any US results where it's reported that X candidate got 51.31112341% of the vote even if that's correct. More likely they would announce 51.31% or maybe even just 51.3%.
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)
It seems you only skimmed the article. The concern is not rounded percentage points.
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.
I think we are going to have to give up anonymity in the name of democracy. Unless you can confirm that your vote has been correctly counted, how can you ever be certain what they have done with it?
Of course, there is the whole concept of forced votes, etc. But it seems unlikely that this could be simultaneously widespread and clandestine. Everything is a tradeoff.
The error in this analysis occurs due to the use of an Excel or LibreOffice spreadsheet that when the cell size is reduced it rounds to 51.2% and when it is increased it gives 51.199997136828
You need an integer number of votes, so you would expect it cannot be equal to an exact fraction. But being within a single vote bound is incredibly suspicious.
51.1999971, 41.1999989, 4.6000039, In this 3 numbers there are total 9+9+8=26 digits, if these 3 numbers are chosen randomly, what's the probability that there are 10 9's with 2 block of 4 consecutive 9's, 5 1's, 4 0's?
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
3) Putting it all together:
The number of favorable outcomes is:
285 * 153 * 4368 * 330 * 5040 * 823543 = 2.51654 × 10^17
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.
Here's this re-explained with a simpler example.
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.
This is not correct since you can claim the above for any number of votes actually obtained (if you asked someone to pick a number from 1 to 10 million, any number the person picks (assuming iid picks) will be by definition 10^-7).
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.
My favourite part of my math education, solutions were always nice.
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:
> Oh, it's sqrt(2), I probably didn't make an error in the calculation
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.
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Except in the real world we are allowed to offload the computation to a computer and have more time to double check things. Nice solutions are necessary due to time and resource constraints that exist within an educational setting.
Tests should have checksums built into the correct answers.
You are right that it is unlikely that one candidate gets the number of votes that exactly matches a certain percentage with one decimal (1:10.000 as per the source article).
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.
The results we're discussing were read live by the president of the Venezuelan electoral authority. It is possible that they... simply read the wrong results? Like an internal estimate rather than the real numbers? But that is a wild mistake for the electoral authority to make.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41125031
If I'm in charge of forging a presidential election, how difficult is it for me to use realistic, "ugly" numbers to sell it more effectively?
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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This kind of mistake is easy to avoid. The problem is that there are a lot of potential mistakes that could be made, this is just one of them.
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Not difficult at all. Just pick the approximate numbers you want and then introduce a random error of a few percent. (Normal, uniform, doesn't really matter). This is also not hard for statistics experts to detect, but it's much harder to prove (aka you've got plausible deniability).
One wonders why they didn't even bother to do fraud slightly better.
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Generate 10,058,744 random floating numbers from [0,1), and count how many will fall into each of the intervals: [0, 0.522), [0.522, 0.522+0.442), or [0.522+0.442, 1). You can do it with less calculations if you know how to generate random numbers from binomial distribution. Then you should calculate percentages from these three numbers just to be sure they are right.
It is not difficult at all, but it needs some basic programming skills and some basic knowledge of statistics.
Hard. Naively, run the election, use real vote counts, claim that you're the one that got more.
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
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It's not hard for you or me.
But for the brutal thugs running Venezuela, it is a very advanced conept.
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Actually think this is a fascinating question, although perhaps for different reasons within whatever reasons might have led you to ask it.
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.
Votes are not random.
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.
Depends on if you're in on it with the forgers or if you're against it but being forced to do it. It's the perfect clue to leave in, as its intention is plausibly deniable and you can tip statisticians to uncover the fraud.
I don't know, but the numbers they provided here are impossible.
You just need to run some Monte Carlo sims where the priors are your desired rates, then use this results to alter the real numbers. It's as random as it gets.
Use the real numbers but change the owners of each count.
Except, of course, if the winning party has a huge advantage which you don't think people would buy.
No you see, they had the perfect plan.
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")
Thanks. Note to self: Next time I want to rig election results, generate a random integer between 54.2% and 54.3% of the vote and count it as the winner's vote, subtract from total pool, wash rinse repeat.
It's remarkable that they don't do this.
The sheer incompetence of the Maduro government and other governments that rig election results is surprising.
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When I try to explain the issue, it boils down to this : the results look like they have been cooked. And the probability of that hapening by chance is 1 in 100 million.
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.
The odds are, that if you go looking for any one of multiple low-probability events, one of them will be found to have happened.
You can also encode little ascii messages onto the fraction. 60,7097107101 % is the worlds smallest whistle
It's called "digit tests" and it was further theorized that the last digit had a particularly even distribution in natural, honest elections.
Further research showed that last digit test wasn't very good - there are multiple obvious counters to the test.
This isn't a digit test, though—the giveaway here isn't a problem with the last digit (or any single digit), the giveaway is that the vote tallies reported exactly match what you would arrive at if you attempted to derive them from nice round 3-digit percentages.
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Many instances of numerical manipulations end up being discovered because the cheater didn't understand math well enough to hide their tracks correctly.
See this link for a recent example that's been on my mind: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mnet_vote_manipulation_inves... Basically, they just grabbed a random-looking numerical constant and used its multiples as the difference between vote numbers.
I have always called the argument that someone couldn't have possibly done it because it would be stupid to have done so the "Connie Defense" after a woman who tried to assert same before I picked her up and put her out of the house like Fred Flinstones cat.
This was after she was caught driving without a license while speeding and smoking weed in a state where it was still illegal.
I don't understand your logic.
"The easiest thing to do" is to do less thinking, less mathematical operations
What's wrong with announcing results with rounded percentages?!
Nothing. The problem is when you obviously picked the rounded percentages that sounded good first and then calculated the number of votes from that.
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It's...rarely to never done? The exact counts are nearly always provided by voting officials.
The press might summarize an election in whole numbers and maybe round up, but...that's very different from voting officials doing it.
The didn’t announce the percentages, they announced the vote counts.
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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.
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.
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We're still clinging to this in 2024? Wow.
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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
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To play the devil's advocate: It's possible that the person making the announcement was only given the rounded percentages and the total number of votes, and then "created" the number of votes per candidate to fit to the format of the announcement. That would be sloppy, but not malicious.
It's technically possible that that was not their weed and their meth in their pants because those were not their pants. However when they have a mile-long rap sheet for selling drugs, it weakens their argument a bit.
What's the mile long rap sheet though? The group that's alleging fraud (AltaVista) is using images of printed receipts from different voting places as a sample to estimate the final vote. That group also said it's same technique resulted in election outcomes that are within 2 points or less of the announced outcome for 2021, 2018, and 2015.
This seems like a new and unique accusation for Venezuela
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/31/world/americas/venezuela-...
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True in general, but here "the President of the National Electoral Commission announced the winner". Sloppy in this situation equals malicious. And I wonder who gave the president the numbers to calculate with. ; )
Sure, and it's only "80%" (another sloppy-looking number) of the count, but these numbers are still useful in that it'd be an insurmountable lead. Independent decision desks don't wait for exact final tallies to call a race. It will likely take weeks for every single vote to be fully counted.
I agree this is at least sloppy work though. Apparently the explanation for the delay in full results is an ongoing cyber attack
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
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.
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That would mean that the group that released the percentage, and thus calculated it, was a different group than the one that released the raw numbers. That doesn't seem likely since they seem to be coming from the same gov't body.
This is an official election release, not some PR post on their website.
Big departments have lots of people, made up of smaller groups, they are not monoliths with a single mind.
I've never seen any preliminary results announcing numbers of votes - it's always rounded up percentages with 1 or 2 decimals.
In my country (Korea) they broadcast vote counts, per district, in real time as data pours in from all over the country. It's a big entertainment going on for the whole night. And you can log onto the website of the office of the election commission and see raw numbers by each voting district.
It's 2024; I'd consider it a minimum level of government competency if anyone wants to be called a democratic country.
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I'd say it's extremely common to announce numbers of votes both as they come in and when the final total is known. Here in the US major news networks (ABC, CNN, Fox, 270towin, and others) all have live maps that show the total number of votes + total percentages during the voting period. They usually also let you hover over the states/counties to see the percentages and votes for the particular area.
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.
If the vote numbers were not provided, this would not have been an issue. But in this case they did announce the vote numbers.
The article has been updated to mention this theory
> 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.
I hope you're right. If there's anything more insulting than having an election tampered with, it's having it tampered with... poorly. Like, you couldn't even bother to lie precisely?
That's the story we'll hear anyway, regardless of what actually happened.
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The point of the article which I missed: the issue here is that the vote totals are very close to their 0.1% place roundings after multiplying the total votes times the percentages, suggesting that the vote totals were simply faked by taking the total votes and multiplying them by percentages precise only to the 0.1% place.
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
I had pulled an all-nighter (writing a grant proposal actually) and was steaming mad reading this and had to scroll a bit. May be a comment like this will help someone else out who might be confused.
> the issue here is that the vote totals are very close to their 0.1% place roundings after multiplying the total votes times the percentages
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.
Yeah, "very close" is not the right wording: "EXACTLY" is.
BTW when actual raw electoral data is available it's possible to create infographics that far easier to read. Like there been Shpilkin graphs for every major Russia elections. When cental authorities trying to match specific number in percent of votes it's always obvious on scale.
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-...
https://meduza.io/en/feature/2024/03/21/putin-2024
This reminds me of the story how the height of Mt. Everest was first measured at exactly 29,000 feet. The surveyor’s boss at the time added two feet thinking no one would trust such an exact number.
I wonder why he added two feet instead of three, or some decimal.
This should remind us that "One Person, One Vote" can all too easily slip into "One Person, One Vote, One Time." For Venezuela that one time was in ~1998.
I guess it might be quite ironic but if people want to vote in a dictatorship, don’t they have the right to under a true democracy?
No, that's a meta-democratic vote, not a democratic vote. Many constitutions disqualify insurgents and revolutionaries from running for office for this reason. At a minimum you'd have to follow the super-majority process for amending the constitution if there is one.
In practice, it's no different from having a revolution. Might as well wear the shoe if it fits. Congrats to the generalissimo dictator!
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Twitter has been saying, "you can vote yourself into a dictatorship but you have to shoot your way out."
Pure democracies will ALWAYS vote themselves into dictatorships. That is why Constitutional Republics that use representation are more long-term stable.
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Yesterday there were news regarding 4 misterious flights from Cuba to Venezuela. Apparently a technical chinese team went there to rig the legitimate results, hence the delay to reveal them. Obviously unverifiable but I wouldn't be surprised to be true.
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.
It's clear Maduro is running a near dictatorship and will do anything to keep power. The country is doing absolutely horribly, all due to mismanagement. Even with proof of fraud, he will pull whatever is needed to avoid stepping down at this point, as is the case with all autocrats.
When a country start building statues in every major city of the current running government leader, you are already past _near dictatorship_. This is full cult of personality and dictatorship bullshit.
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.
No one has yet to post the actual official statement by the CNE. It doesn't seem too unlikely that they had a total vote count as well as the percentages for each candidate and released those. It feels like people are jumping to some major conclusions in this thread
Here is the CNE press conference where the numbers were announced: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pB7g4y4M4s8
Wonderful, thanks! I really struggled to find this. Funnily enough they give different percentages. 51.1% to 44.2%
round and round we go
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cause they did not release any official statement, they only read those numbers on national TV and 8 hours later they made maduro sign the papers as a winners.
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.
It's all nice looking for suspicious patterns but a bit pointless when the election is very obviously rigged (107% of votes counted etc) and Maduro is like I control the army what you going to do about it?
The latter is a more interesting question. There must be some way to get vote rigging dictators out?
> 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.
I don't know really but the US was able to go arrest Noriega without too much grief and Britain where I live used to take over loads of countries for it's empire before that became politically incorrect. Maybe we could have some modified version limited to support a countries peoples against illegitimate rulers on a kick them out, hold elections then leave basis?
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.
Reminds me of https://danluu.com/discontinuities/
Here are the true vote totals, as reported by witnesses at the polling booths:
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.
How do the witnesses know how people voted? I can't find sources saying whether Venezuela has as secret ballot or not, but I assume so otherwise it would be all over the news
Witnesses representing political parties are entitled by law to a copy of the tally before the machine sends its results to a central server.
Each copy must be signed by all witnesses and also contains a digitally-signed hash of the tally at the bottom of the receipt.
Forgive me if this is a dumb question, but isn't every vote total extremely unlikely if you make it precise to the exact number of votes? Like the chances of getting n+1, n+2... votes is roughly the same probability.
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 question was "How likely is it that the votes worked out so well that they were basically even 1/10 percentages and not ugly numbers?"
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.
Another way of writing it out:
How likely is it that you'd get these votes distributions
exactly? With all of those clean 0s? Very low.
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.
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If the lottery administrator's daughter wins the lottery, he may say "no, no - don't you see, her probability of getting the winning numbers is exactly the same as anyone else's!"
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.
The other commenters point at the explanation but don't explain it rigorously IMO. Here's how I'd say it.
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.
Yeah, they just forgot to report 59.869280705993% instead of 60%. They would have got away with it too, if it weren't for those cunning statisticians. They just forgot to come up with a random, credible number. Happens to the best of us I guess.
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.
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The second half of the article answers this very question.
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?
Yes. For one set. But if your next lottery is 4,5,6,7,8,9 and then 11,12,13,14,15,16 it becomes improbable.
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.
I've tried to explain this a couple of times, but I keep falling back on the calculations used to show the problem (that it's not the numbers themselves, but the pattern). This comment nailed it with simply "It's that they're all round numbers". I've always been terrible at rephrasing things to make stronger points in a more concise way. Thanks! :D
> 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.
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.
> 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
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I think you are correct, but that's missing the point of the article's content. I'm just a programmer, not a math expert, but I believe these statements are accurate.
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.
That’s not what this article is about. Read the article.
FWIW, statistics is hard.
Having read the article, I came away with similar questions and I appreciate the sibling comments clarifying.
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Didn't they show the distribution of votes on the TV and the sum there was 106%?
https://x.com/weegeedutchie/status/1817903230946337121
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%.
109%. Which of course isnt better.
That would make this whole article bogus.
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.
I love trying to imagine what it's like being inside the mind of somebody who can entertain this kind of material (assumptions based on statistics, alone), while simultaneously believing that the 2020 US presidential election was sound and secure.
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...
It's disingenuous to say discussion about election fraud isn't political in nature, what else could it be? I dismissed the 2020 US election fraud claims without looking into them, but I've seen it brought up a few times in this thread and people on HN usually hold reasonable views. After some research I've found nothing remotely convincing.
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.
It's not possible to point out the evidence any longer - those days are over. There was a public plan, by the government and the host of big tech companies that are in bed with that government (In-Q-Tel, for example, is not some big secret), to silence anyone discussing it. You wouldn't here much about this, because of this.
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.
This is why you don’t vote away your right to bear arms
There were just as many, if not more, statistical anomalies in the US 2020 election, but all the guns stayed in their gun lockers then.
Yea, be awful if, say the US, was on the precipice of slipping into a dictaorship. Thank god they've got guns, that'll make everything better!
Venezuela went from the richest country in South America to one where the average citizen lost 17lbs in a year. Once your economy looks like that, the slightest hint of armed unrest could collapse the government. The only reason Maduro stayed in power was because he could have the military shoot into unarmed crowds with no repercussions.
Yes, an armed society is a polite society, and no one is more polite than, say, American police or the ATF or FBI or IRS.
If you see an American walk into a school or a hotel with a gun, you know everything is going to be A-OK.
True.
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.
> It seems many think you can carbon tax out of any problem.
What relevance does this have to gun ownership?
It will be interesting to see if they release the tallies by region, on how those number will match with the overall result.
Coming from a family that lived in soviet russia (and still partly is), this reminds me of Putin’s 85% approval rating.
But if you ask anybody in private, nobody voted for him…
Is it possible some idiot was given the percentages, the total votes, and then decided they could just estimate the breakdown from the percentages for the announcement? Assuming stupidity before malice.
We all mock these third rate dictatorship issues, but then in America we allow voting without ID or any sorts of protection at all... Basically asking people to commit fraud.
misleading article, pretending this is some kind of scientific evidence of fraud without mentioning other possible explanations.
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”
It could be someone having the total and percentages, and "reconstructing" the individual vote counts. Or, that's what they would say anyway in response to this.
I’d like to see a pattern that is likely to put this in perspective.
Rolling ten 1s in a row does look suspicious but it’s just as likely as rolling 4846211536
I used to think that there’s something terribly embarrassing about watching people like these lying in such a pathetically obvious way. Like catching my 5 year old in a lie. But I think I’m realizing that it simply doesn’t matter. They just need the “forged document” to hold up in their hands. Not to survive scrutiny.
If the post looks odd and makes no sense, it's because CF is blocking image loads.
I think there are two screenshots which are missing in the initial text.
Anyone else stuck in an endless "Verifying you are human. This may take a few seconds." cloudflare captcha loop?
I get this due to a browser extension I have (in my case it is the extension FreeTree, but chances are you aren't using that). Maybe try disabling all extensions and try the captcha again?
Are you sure you're human?
if only we had secure computing devices. Imagine a useful application of blockchain. A historic first :p
In the US we have known-flawed closed-source machines where the company executives that make them also make clearly political statements that favor the side that used to be against those machines.
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.
We do need a better solution because running elections is very expensive while voter participation is not great if you have to show up in person.
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>Paper, no mail, vote one day on a holiday, count by that night, all manual all reviewed.
And voter ID required
How do you ensure one person one vote without giving an authority the sole power of creating keys? How do you prevent them creating additional ones?
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?
> That seems fishy
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?
comparating the venezuela data against other recent elections:
https://x.com/opablo_gm/status/1819096457850335384
and allowing the anomaly to surface
I find it quite amusing to watch people declare the Venezuela election stolen by the very same metrics they loudly proclaimed meant absolutely nothing in the 2020 US elections. At this point, it's not a hard bet to think I'll have more mirth coming my way in November.
There was a lot more light shone on the US elections. Over 60 cases were brought by Trump supporters, many before Republican judges, some of whome were even Trump appointees. All fraud cases were dismissed out of hand for lack of evidence. The only case not dismissed was about time allowed to vote.
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/...
The most important part of the article is buried in the PS:es:
> 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.
some reporting [0] is claiming the opposite: 2.75 million votes for Maduro and 6.27 million for his rival, Edmundo Gonzalez.
[0] https://www.reuters.com/world/americas/government-opposition...
God, I love mathematicians!
There’s also the really powerful Benford’s Law which has been admitted in criminal court cases!
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> statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu
> Verify you are human by completing the action below.
No thanks and fuck you to you too.
More on this. The Carter Foundation, the only impartial observers who were in Venezuela for the election, and who previously defended Venezuela's election system following Chavez's 2004 win, has called on Maduro's government to release local vote tallies, which apparently it is never going to do: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/31/world/americas/venezuela-...
Maduro just responded to a journalist from the Washington Post that they will not be able to show the local vote tallies now because, at this moment, the National Electoral Council is in “a cyber battle never seen before.”
I was curious to check the National Electoral Council website, to get their latest tally straight from the source...
http://www.cne.gov.ve/
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
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List of fake news anti-Maduro posts https://x.com/MyLordBebo/status/1818972331424768091
Exactly. You don't need advanced math. You only need to see the tallies for every voting center and make sum. I believe the opposition has already done this. The fact that the government has not done it shows that they just don't have the numbers.
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The issue in this post has nothing to do with any of the outside election observers. You could replace the Carter Foundation with the CIA itself and you'd still be left with the same problem, which is that these vote counts are fictitious.
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The Carter Foundation stood up to the US govt in 2004, when they validated Chavez's win. Maybe they became un-impartial since then. But you're assuming a lot.
How should they be funded, for you to consider them impartial?
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Is anyone really impartial?
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The National Lawyers Guild twitter profile reads:
"Human rights over property interests since 1937. Fighting for liberation, organizing in solidarity with radical movement leaders."
https://x.com/NLGnews
They are certainly not impartial.
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I'd never heard of the National Lawyer's Guild. According to Wikipedia:
"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)
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The numerical problem does not hinge on the reputability of any particular observer organization, though. You can just verify it on a calculator yourself!
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 .
I'm not sure I understand this battle-of-experts thing happening here. The Venezuelan authorities released the vote totals. They work out to exactly 51.2% vs 44.2%. That did not happen in the real world. Could not have.
We don't need the Carter Foundation to tell us these results are false. They are manifestly false.
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Given the transparently fake vote totals, perhaps we can update our priors on the impartiality of this guild.
Anyone who calls this election fair is not impartial. The scale of the fraud is enormous and undeniable.
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?
This is a strangely belligerent statement from an organization tasked with being impartial observers. I don’t know what to make of it, but it seems very odd.
edit: The use of the term “opposition” seems like a bit of a tell.
So much the worse for the National Lawyers Guild then! The numbers are undeniably fake.
> The National Lawyers Guild was also an observer
they sent 5 observers only per https://truthout.org/articles/maduro-wins-reelection-for-thi...
If you want to claim to be impartial, you need to make a case that you are not biased. The NLG is far from that.
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I can't find much about the Carter Foundation, but Edison Polling—the organization that released the exit poll that showed the opposition winning— does have a long history of criticism for being US-backed and consistently producing results that favor US interests.
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-...
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Maduro is also saying that the mass protests he's facing are the product of Chilean-trained operatives acting against him, he says many things.
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Yeah, and Trump promised to release his tax returns. Around here, our sewage trucks have the word "Political Promises" painted on the side.
>Maduro has already vowed to release election data...
Yeah and everyone's still waiting on D's tax returns.
Promises have to be kept.
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Hard to imagine a incumbant who destoryed the country while millions flee won the election, also hard to imagine he's going anywhere
This is a bit of an aside, but as a geopolitical news junkie, what I keep searching on Google News is: Venezuela election Lula
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...
> Given Lula's past dedication to (sic) Chavezism
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...
Twitter (Alperovitch / Silverado Policy, someone influential enough to be sanctioned by Russian gov.) and HN is what surfaced the Russian invasion months before it happened. No academic book or Axios or Politico article was there to inform you conclusively that early. Lesswrong and HN were also much earlier (Jan '20) to the Covid epidemic, a major geopol issue, than your sources.
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.
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> As someone who worked in the space, stop. It's a waste of time as you're not in a position to make changes
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.
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Why should they stop if this is something they enjoy reading and learning about? Why should they want to or have to affect changes personally? I fail to understand the last part..
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>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"
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...
[1] http://arxiv.org/pdf/1402.5644
> but it's Chamber of Deputies has the actual power
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.
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Axios is easy, butdo you mind expanding the acronyms to true newbs in the field? :)
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 :)
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I am confused.
Are you arguing that Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva's official public stance on the Venezuelan election has no influence?
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> 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,
You could have cut this out of your comment, and made your point much more effectively without the elitism.
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If it was just 2 candidates, it would be slightly more believable, a 1 in 10,000 chance instead of 1 in 100 million chance.
Well, that is Maduro, a 1 in 100 million leader. There are fewer than 28 million people in Venezuela so the rest of us better watch out!
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It's also funny to see the current president removed to "preserve democracy".
Removed in what way? He dropped as a presidential candidate, not from the office itself.
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To be fair, the opposition leader was basically handpicked and funded by the US
I'm not sure I understand your comment. Maduro/Chavez were Soviet/Russia backed, and have since not only wrecked the country, but have now seized permanent dictatorial power.
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Most people in the US aren't even aware of the constant State Department and CIA effort to overturn democracy in Venezuela so they can appoint a US corporation friendly leader.
Columbia Uni is a hotbed for State Department types. This is clearly a concerted effort to create a narrative. The US doesn't even allow external election monitors for its own elections. At least Venezuela had some level of monitoring. The hypocrisy is abject.
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It's even more surprising that you can't argue with chavistas since there aren't any.
There are plenty in Venezuela, all speaking Spanish to each other.
You would never ever run into one online on a predominantly English speaking website or in America/Europe in person, but you might encounter one of the upper classes.
I used to work with one of them. She complained that Chavez stole her family's second home. I presumed her family, like America, also supported the attempted military coup shortly after he was elected in 2002.
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Which propaganda is being spread here?
Something something liberal western mathematics.
If the results are legitimate, how come independent polls were giving 30 percentage points less to Maduro than he obtained? Why were international entities not allowed to observe? And what about the multiple instances of harassment of opposition candidates?
I'm not a fan of US imperialism, but that doesn't mean you need to support any thug whose rethoric opposes the US, going so far as to deny evident reality.
Maybe you should look up who funded the "independent polls".
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They have data. You have the claim that it's propaganda, but you don't refute the data (or even the argument). That's not an effective rebuttal; it's just an attempted deflection. In fact, it shouldn't persuade anyone, even someone who is born and brought up in Venezuela.
you submitted data about Iraq, before Iraq invasion and on other countries too. now everyone knows how much truth that was. The point is whenever the country got natural resources such as oil and gas and want to use it for themselves that benefits people they face all this democracy, freedom and election rigging issues. everyone in the world can see that, except people of usa, who are brainwashed too much.
What the hell are you talking about, burner account clown?
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Probably just a mental hiccup, but the page was published by Columbia University, not by any organization in Colombia.
They're probably just happy to keep the site somewhat reachable during spikes like this without constantly babying it. I.e. I doubt they are interested in filtering itself as much as even less interested in alternatives.
There are so many abuse protection companies out there that don't stigmatize non-western Internet users. Also, do we really think that Columbia's IT people are that bad? I doubt a page like this would get a substantial DDoS.
Making it inaccessible to half the world, particularly much of the country that the article is about, is conceding ahead of time to the people that might want to DDoS a page like this in the first place.
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>thats why its so strange that this was never mentioned on NPR or anywhere else that i saw. actually it was mentioned once on NPR, extremely briefly. but it was never debunked, they never published an attempt to debunk it.
I remember hearing about it more than once on NPR and "On the Media" which is basically NPR. In fact, I just did a search on NPR's website:
https://www.npr.org/search/?query=2000%20mules&page=1
>3,558 results
scrolling through that list of thousands of results, only 6 or so have an actual match for the search term (lol). that explains why i never heard about it. the rest seem to be articles that are about elections, generally related, but do not mention 2000 mules. there are no debunking in those search results, only descriptions calling the movie "widely debunked" (by who?)
i just read the one article on that list that appears to directly address the movie.
https://www.npr.org/2022/09/08/1121648290/a-publisher-abrupt...
it links two articles that claim to debunk the movie, both of which are behind a pay wall. it then goes on to basically say nothing. they contact the groups that the movie accused of helping stuff ballots and those groups say "thats malarky." thats it.
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2000 mules is utter BS from a source that specializes in such things. If there were a shred of evidence about even a single claim made by this film, the conservative super majority in the supreme court would be all over it.
Wikipedia summary: 2000 Mules is a 2022 American conspiracist[4][5][6][7] political film from right-wing political commentator Dinesh D'Souza. The film falsely[8][9][10] claims unnamed nonprofit organizations supposedly associated with the Democratic Party paid "mules" to illegally collect and deposit ballots into drop boxes in the swing states of Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin during the 2020 presidential election. D'Souza has a history of creating and spreading false conspiracy theories.[11]
Not sure if related but also a book on this as well:-
https://www.amazon.com/Stealing-Your-Vote-Inside-Election/dp...
Whether or not there was election fraud I don't know. All I know is I cannot trust anything the mainstream media has to say on the topic (or any other topic for that matter).
Instead of reading conspiratorial books from authors with a profit motive, ask a simple question. If there was election fraud, how come the conservative super majority in the supreme court is not all over it?
Ask for evidence first, before putting your faith in conspiracy theories, from books or movies.
If you believe in things without evidence, and then vote based on that, we're all screwed. This is the path to ideocracy.
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>it seems like there's no evidence of the government posting these vote tallies
They were released at a press conference. They read out both the numbers and the percentages. See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pB7g4y4M4s8
It is still plausible that this is an Excel error, but it's certainly suspicious.
http://www.sunai.gob.ve/sunai-web/public/index.php/publicaci... according to the acronym that’s some superintendent related to internal audits, that seems pretty official.
But still won’t stop the “the US manipulated the results crowd”, nothing will.
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The US now controls mathematics, the CIA is so advanced that they are changing how mathematics works to accuse Maduro of fraud, brilliant.
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Ah, this is hardly the US government trying to stage their own coup. But it tracks with their history when they did try such things themselves.
It was just planned in the US and executed with logistical support from the US with a green light given by Trump (who announced he had no "direct" role in the operation).
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Thinking that the US state department controls math - and the Venezuelan vote system's integrity is above mathematics - is a new low.
A joke comes to mind: Children are giggling and misbehaving in class so the math teacher storms out: - If you do not pay attention then 80% of the class will fail the tests! Someone from back row: - Bollocks! We aren't that many in the class!
Was that you from the back row?
I didn't say "US state department controls math" that's a nice strawman. I said there's a reasonable explanation for the anomaly but the real reason you're seeing this is because of the State Dept's dissatisfaction with the election. I'd hope at least the crowd on HN would be smart enough not to be duped by the establishment but I guess not.
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Citation needed
Sure here you go https://www.caracaschronicles.com/2024/07/31/falsifying-vote...
https://venezuelanalysis.com/news/13801/
https://www.ndi.org/e-voting-guide/examples/e-voting-audits-...
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I love that this comment came up directly after (at the time I'm writing this comment) "Math doesn't care about your feelings."
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The US can be trying to overthrow the government and said government can also be corrupt and undemocratic. The context doesn't take away from the fact that these numbers are impossible, and your comment doesn't offer any explanation for them.
Americans always seem more concerned about Venezuelan elections than Venezuelans are.
Im venezuelan and can assure you there is not a single venezuelan not talking about this 24/7 right now. And yes the international atenttion helps. Democracies are fragile and you should be invested in keeping them alive even outside of the US.
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Aren't percentages typically rounded? I don't see any US results where it's reported that X candidate got 51.31112341% of the vote even if that's correct. More likely they would announce 51.31% or maybe even just 51.3%.
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)
It seems you only skimmed the article. The concern is not rounded percentage points.
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.
Ah, got it. I had indeed misread/misunderstood the article.
Venezuela released the vote totals
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
https://results.elections.ny.gov/document/468?page=1
I think we are going to have to give up anonymity in the name of democracy. Unless you can confirm that your vote has been correctly counted, how can you ever be certain what they have done with it?
Isn't this exactly what freedomtool aims to solve? https://freedomtool.org/#/doc
Can you think of any problems that would arise from non-anonymous voting?
Of course, there is the whole concept of forced votes, etc. But it seems unlikely that this could be simultaneously widespread and clandestine. Everything is a tradeoff.
The error in this analysis occurs due to the use of an Excel or LibreOffice spreadsheet that when the cell size is reduced it rounds to 51.2% and when it is increased it gives 51.199997136828
You need an integer number of votes, so you would expect it cannot be equal to an exact fraction. But being within a single vote bound is incredibly suspicious.
51.199997136828 is what you get when you do =ROUND(N_votes * 0.512)/N_votes. So it may as well be 51.2%.
51.1999971, 41.1999989, 4.6000039, In this 3 numbers there are total 9+9+8=26 digits, if these 3 numbers are chosen randomly, what's the probability that there are 10 9's with 2 block of 4 consecutive 9's, 5 1's, 4 0's?
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:
3) Putting it all together: The number of favorable outcomes is: 285 * 153 * 4368 * 330 * 5040 * 823543 = 2.51654 × 10^17
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.