Comment by gmaster1440
1 year ago
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?
1 year ago
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.
> On the other hand, the goal is to get away with fraud, not to convince an international community who will likely look for any confirmation of their suspicion.
Despite my joke in a sibling comment, this is key. When you're a politician everything is power relations. Sometimes it's necessary to show that you have the power to semi-obviously rig an election. Your bargaining position is different if it requires military force to remove you vs just an unhappy electorate. You can achieve different things.
Yup. It’s a special kind of power that can flat out rig an election and have opponents ‘fall out of windows’ with no repercussions.
The type no one wants to even be seen trying to challenge.
>It would be interesting to look for patterns in a (presumably) fair election like the recent British one for comparison.
Someone should run this same analysis on all the election data they can get their hands on. Who knows what might be found.
There were some pretty shit analysises of the 2020 US elections that Matt Parker covered with videos like "Why do Biden's votes not follow Benford's law?"[1] and "Why was Biden's win calculated to be 1 in 1,000,000,000,000,000?"[2].
I don't know about other countries, but the amount of data that every county in every US state produces makes systematic fraud pretty much impossible. If there's literally only 3 numbers produced by the Venezuelan government, you need to be seriously incompetent to have detectable fraud because techniques like Benford's or Zipf's law need lots of individual numbers.
[1]: https://youtu.be/etx0k1nLn78
[2]: https://youtu.be/ua5aOFi-DKs
1 reply →
If you were forced against your will to aid in this type of fraud, might you not intentionally include a subtle error in your work that reveals its illegitimacy to a careful observer?
Gun to my head? No.
If have thought it more likely that the stress would cause an accidental subtle error.
E. Goldstein wins with 51.2HELPIMTRAPPEDINANELECTIONRIGGINGBUNKER% of the vote!
One would have to take care with the analysis because humans are actually trapped in vote counting bunkers (or local sports halls more likely) in legitimate elections. Any analysis that simply concludes votes were subject to the foibles of hand counting wouldn’t be very useful.
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.
And the people doing the fraud aren't going to be computer scientists or statisticians. They were chosen for their loyalty to the dear leader.
The dear leader wasn't chosen for his ability, either, but for his loyalty to the previous dear leader.
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.
If they can get away with being balatant, that is even more of a show of power.
Think of it this way - who has more power in a relationship? The one who is really good at cheating and hiding it? Or the the one who doesn’t even try to hide it, but suffers no consequences?
Just look at how many comments are trying to figure out how the numbers could be legitimate, and how unlikely it is that Maduro is going to actually be removed from power.
Unless done carefully this will almost certainly fail Benford’s Law.
Manipulating statistics is harder than you think.
> Unless done carefully this will almost certainly fail Benford’s Law.
IIRC Benford's law relies upon things that have power-law underpinnings, such as iterated growth% at different rates. In contrast, relative vote amounts at a given point in time don't have many ways to exhibit that, particularly when the total number of voters is fixed rather than having voters divide like bacteria during polling day.
However it might work if you were checking the growth in total eligible voters in different locations over time.
I like to imagine Benford's Law a bit like throwing randomly distributed darts through the air at a paper target, exept the target is graph paper with log-10 subdivisions. The "leading 1" zones are simply bigger targets. [0]
[0] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Logarithmic_scale.sv...
It's my understanding that legitimate vote totals aren't likely to conform to Benford's law in the first place.
Even if that's the case, though, there might very well be other applicable tests this would run afoul of.
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The Biden election in 2020 also failed Benford's law - unless you're suggesting that one was fake, it seems that failing Benford's law is okay.
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But votes aren’t tallied in one location, districts individually tally.
So now you’ve got to force each of those districts to change the numbers.
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
> Naively, run the election, use real vote counts, claim that you're the one that got more.
I think this would be even more obvious, even to the general public, especially when there is a landslide victory. Oh, your result is 70%? That's exactly what the exit polls said about our candidate.
It's not hard for you or me.
But for the brutal thugs running Venezuela, it is a very advanced conept.
it's like Russia killing someone with polonium. Hitting 60% exactly sends a message to anyone with the bright idea of running against the brutal thug's preferred candidate that it might not be a good idea, because there are brutal thugs involved.
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")