Comment by tptacek
1 year ago
I'm summarizing that PPS in my comment. The exculpatory scenario is: (1) start with real numbers, (2) compute percentages, (3) round percentages, (4) discard original numbers, (5) compute new numbers from the round percentages.
Steps (4) and (5) don't have any valid explanation, and few (though maybe some) plausible human error explanations.
As long as we're on the same page that nobody ever had any business reporting the numbers in step (5) --- they're completely fictitious! --- I don't have much to argue about here. The politics aren't interesting to me.
> Steps (4) and (5) don't have any valid explanation, and few (though maybe some) plausible human error explanations.
It does... Person A didn't send the original numbers to Person B. And then Person B wanted to publish a document that showed the original numbers anyway (maybe they were asked to by a media person or something). And they did the glaringly obvious calculation of g% x total_votes and called it a day instead of being delayed for hours or days waiting for a request for the original numbers. This is really a very common scenario that happens everywhere in multiple fields.
Person B made up vote counts for the candidates in your scenario. That is not a very common scenario in official elections results reporting, which is what this was.