Comment by foobarqux
1 year ago
As they say in the article one explanation is the guy publishing the numbers was not given the actual counts only the percentages and imputed the counts on his own.
1 year ago
As they say in the article one explanation is the guy publishing the numbers was not given the actual counts only the percentages and imputed the counts on his own.
That's fishy in its own right. The absolute vote tallies are the key thing in a democratic election. The percentages are a derived value to quickly make sense of the vote tallies, but the vote tallies are the actual results. Why would you need to derive vote tallies from percentages when you derived the percentages from the tallies?
It'd be like feeding your English marketing copy into Google translate to Spanish and back and using that instead of the original copy.
Because voting results are universally reported as percentages, that's what everyone uses and understands.
Reporting just the percentages makes sense. Reporting rounded versions of those percentages not only makes sense, but is the universal idiom for reporting percentages. But reporting synthesized vote counts from the percentages --- even from non-rounded percentages --- is not normal.
People on this thread are hung up on the reported percentages, but those don't matter in this analysis at all. They're not the problem. The problem is the counts themselves. Discard the reported percentages entirely; exact same critique, one statistics students would spot instantly.
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No, they are universally reported in raw numbers accompanied by percentages, as indeed they were here. The raw numbers are universally understood to be derived from the percentages and not vice versa. The votes are the ground truth.
That's how elections always work. The votes are what counts, the percentages are an abstraction to make the votes easier to parse. Any government agency that doesn't operate that way doesn't understand democracy, even if they weren't committing outright fraud.
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