Comment by foobarqux
1 year ago
First these were intermediate results. Second virtually no one reads or understands raw tallies, I don't know anyone who would or could quote them in any election. The final result, the result that is published as a headline in the newspaper are the rounded percentages.
No one is saying that the percentages are not derived from the raw tallies they are saying that it might be that somewhere in the game of telephone to the person that goes on TV and reports only the percentages were communicated and they realized they should put the tallies in too so they imputed them from the numbers they had, the total votes cast and the percentages (and naively it seems obviously okay to do that).
> Virtually no one reads or understands raw tallies...
I believe virtually anyone could look at the raw tallies and see which is the largest, and that a majority could calculate the percentages by themselves, if they were so inclined. This was direct election plurality voting, not some sort of proportional voting scheme, and even if it were, having the raw tallies in the public domain is essential to transparency, verification and legitimacy.
> it might be that somewhere in the game of telephone to the person that goes on TV and reports only the percentages were communicated and they realized they should put the tallies in too so they imputed them from the numbers they had
And I'm telling you that anyone who handles votes this way doesn't understand democracy. The best case scenario here is that the Venezuelan government doesn't really care about the vote tally (which is, again, bad, because the votes are the thing). The worst case is that they fabricated it entirely. Neither one speaks well for the state of democracy in Venezuela.