Comment by kadoban

1 year ago

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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kadoban

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nikolay  1 year ago

Not necessarily. If the person announcing was given the number of votes and rounded percentages, then this could explain it. For example, in my country, they always report only turnout as a percentage with a single decimal and the share of each candidate/party with up to 2 decimals, never the number of votes - who cares about the absolute numbers anyway?

  • forgetfulness  1 year ago

    The thing is, that the absolute number of votes work out to give the announced percentage with 6 decimal digits, just as if they put "51.2%" on a calculator and worked backwards. The point is that they didn't actually round the percentage, it was actually 51.199999 for the President and 44.199999 for the opposition, the only credible explanation is that they picked the percentages and then cooked the absolute numbers to line up, so the numbers look "ugly", but the percentages are neat.

  • marcosdumay  1 year ago

    That's a really bad thing and a reason not to trust the entire system.

    They should report the absolute number of votes at each counting station.

    • nikolay  1 year ago

      I am talking about publicizing on media - the raw data of Bulgarian elections is available for download in real time during the counting and afterward [0], including the scanned protocols of each polling station and the video recording, which is now required. Even if the voting is electronic in particular (well, most) stations, there's still a paper protocol signed by the members of the section's committee.

      A tweet, an article, or a chart on TV doesn't prove anything, as they are not official documents.

      [0]: https://results.cik.bg/

      1 reply →

  • kadoban  1 year ago

    A possibility, but not a good one. Depending on your goal, you either care a _lot_ about the raw number (in which case doing that calculation is _insane_), or you don't care really at all (so...why would you calculate it?).