Comment by foobarqux
1 year ago
If you read the addendum to the article they provide a perfectly plausible explanation: namely that (only) rounded percentages were provided to an intermediary and from there they back-calculated the counts.
Given that the US has claimed vote rigging in the past in Venezuela without evidence contrary to the determination of international observers (and has and is trying to overthrow the government to install a US-backed one) claims of vote rigging should be viewed with an enormous amount of skepticism.
They reported vote counts for both candidates that were fictitious. I don't understand how anybody can rationalize that.
I'm no fan of Maduro but I care about the politics of the region a lot less than I do about the mathematics of the situation. It's alarming to see people try to back-rationalize how these numbers could have been legitimate because, for instance (elsewhere on this thread), "it would have been easy for them just make realistic numbers".
Whatever else happened, these numbers are fictitious. If you want to come up with scenarios where the numbers don't matter, that's fine, you do you, I won't get in your way. But you can't rescue the numbers themselves.
As I and others (including in the original article) have explained it is a plausible result to create legitimately. Given the context that unsubstantiated vote-rigging allegations have occurred in the past (and the dire consequences of destabilizing a government based on false claims) extreme skepticism is warranted.
You can tell a story about a process that publishes these numbers in good faith, but not a story in which the vote counts reported are anything other than fictitious. It is not, in fact, an ordinary sequence of events to take true counts, work out their percentages, round them, discard the original counts, and work back new counts from the rounded percentages. Those new counts are a lie, no matter what the process was.
The rest of this, I don't care.
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