8 ms·

Here's this re-explained with a simpler example. Imagine you have 1,000 votes. You want to show that your political party got 60% of the vote, so, you claim:

Here's this re-explained with a simpler example. Imagine you have 1,000 votes. You want to show that your political party got 60% of the vote, so, you claim: My party: 600 votes Opposition: 300 votes Other: 100 votes Presto, we got a good breakdown. The people will buy it.... It makes sense that 600 is exactly 60% of 1,000, because this was an artificial example. But in the real world, we don't get 1,000 votes. We get 10,058,774 votes. What are the odds that the % of votes you get is a round number like 60%, or 51.2%? They're infinitesimally small. You're much more likely to get ugly numbers, like 59.941323854% of the vote, unless you choose some artificial percentage and work backward.

nikolay 2y ago
What's wrong with announcing results with rounded percentages?!
- kadoban 2y ago
  Nothing. The problem is when you obviously picked the rounded percentages that sounded good first and then calculated the number of votes from that.
  - nikolay 2y ago
    Not necessarily. If the person announcing was given the number of votes and rounded percentages, then this could explain it. For example, in my country, they always report only turnout as a percentage with a single decimal and the share of each candidate/party with up to 2 decimals, never the number of votes - who cares about the absolute numbers anyway?
    - lxgr 2y ago
      But they did report the absolute number of votes.
      - nikolay 2y ago
        Where? In a tweet?
    - kadoban 2y ago
      A possibility, but not a good one. Depending on your goal, you either care a _lot_ about the raw number (in which case doing that calculation is _insane_), or you don't care really at all (so...why would you calculate it?).
    - forgetfulness 2y ago
      The thing is, that the absolute number of votes work out to give the announced percentage with 6 decimal digits, just as if they put "51.2%" on a calculator and worked backwards. The point is that they didn't actually round the percentage, it was actually 51.199999 for the President and 44.199999 for the opposition, the only credible explanation is that they picked the percentages and then cooked the absolute numbers to line up, so the numbers look "ugly", but the percentages are neat.
      - foobarqux 2y 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.
        lolinder 2y ago
        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.
        foobarqux 2y ago
        Because voting results are universally reported as percentages, that's what everyone uses and understands.
        lolinder 2y ago
        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.
    - marcosdumay 2y ago
      That's a really bad thing and a reason not to trust the entire system. They should report the absolute number of votes at each counting station.
      - nikolay 2y ago
        I am talking about publicizing on media - the raw data of Bulgarian elections is available for download in real time during the counting and afterward [0], including the scanned protocols of each polling station and the video recording, which is now required. Even if the voting is electronic in particular (well, most) stations, there's still a paper protocol signed by the members of the section's committee. A tweet, an article, or a chart on TV doesn't prove anything, as they are not official documents. [0]: https://results.cik.bg/ https://results.cik.bg/
        marcosdumay 2y ago
        Well, nobody else is talking about the headline numbers. That was the miscommunication.
- KennyBlanken 2y ago
  It's...rarely to never done? The exact counts are nearly always provided by voting officials. The press might summarize an election in whole numbers and maybe round up, but...that's very different from voting officials doing it.
- paxys 2y ago
  The didn’t announce the percentages, they announced the vote counts.
  - nikolay 2y ago
    Why is that article not pointing to the source? I've looked for it, and I couldn't find it.
    - kgwgk 2y ago
      https://x.com/yvangil/status/1817787106237743565 https://x.com/yvangil/status/1817787106237743565
      - nikolay 2y ago
        I don't see the total number of votes/ballots. Is the vote in Venezuela 100% electronic? If not, there might be invalid paper ballots, too.
        olalonde 2y ago
        They are read aloud by the presenter in Spanish (both total votes and percentages). You can also see them in the tweet if you don't speak Spanish. The announcer appears to represent the national electoral council (Consejo Nacional Electoral), so it's unlikely that he didn't have access to the exact counts (and had to compute them from percentages).
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
- a0123 2y ago
  [flagged]
  - devnullbrain 2y ago
    In western democracies, among others, we use "" to denote that we are quoting somebody.
  - killingtime74 2y ago
    In western countries power is handed over routinely amongst political enemies. So what, the incumbent is cooking the books to give power to their rival? If power is being handed over, where is the book cooking? Here they are staying in power. You think the Liberals in Australia wanted to give power over to Labor? You think Obama liked having Trump follow him? Macron cooked the votes so his own party lost the majority?
  - noduerme 2y ago
    Or maybe western democracies do demand higher standards of transparency. Notice which countries called to congratulate Maduro immediately without waiting a day to find out if any the announced results were valid: Russia, Iran and Cuba. Paragons of liberty.
  - stoperaticless 2y ago
    s/(non-)?western//g > See when democracies do it, it's ¨just to make it simpler" > When dictatorships do it, it's "fraud". Seems plausible. Credentials and reputation matter.
KennyBlanken 2y ago
It's called "digit tests" and it was further theorized that the last digit had a particularly even distribution in natural, honest elections. Further research showed that last digit test wasn't very good - there are multiple obvious counters to the test.
- lolinder 2y ago
  This isn't a digit test, though—the giveaway here isn't a problem with the last digit (or any single digit), the giveaway is that the vote tallies reported exactly match what you would arrive at if you attempted to derive them from nice round 3-digit percentages.
tomp 2y ago
My favourite part of my math education, solutions were always nice. Compute the eigenvalues of a random-looking (but still integers) 4x4 matrix? Oh, it's sqrt(2), I probably didn't make an error in the calculation. Then came the advanced physics / mechanics exam. It threw a wrench into our beautiful system. The results were just about anything, incredibly ugly, like the real world :yuck: :vomit:
- ertgbnm 2y ago
  Except in the real world we are allowed to offload the computation to a computer and have more time to double check things. Nice solutions are necessary due to time and resource constraints that exist within an educational setting.
- amelius 2y ago
  Tests should have checksums built into the correct answers.
- timthorn 2y ago
  > Oh, it's sqrt(2), I probably didn't make an error in the calculation You remind me of my university maths exam. In all the past papers, the eigenvalues came out to be round numbers. But in the real paper I sat, no matter how many times I tried to find my mistake, they didn't. I wasted hours of the exam on that. It was the professor's final year before his retirement.
  - twright0 2y ago
    The year that I took AP Physics, every single piece of study material and practice test exercised only really simple math - small numbers, everything cleanly worked out into integers, etc etc. I did almost everything in my head or with quick notes on paper. This pattern was so consistent I almost didn't bring my calculator into the actual exam because I hadn't needed it all year, and grabbed it only at the last second "just in case". Turns out that was not a design goal of the real exam and basically nothing worked out to neat, small integer solutions - I probably would have hard failed without the calculator. I'm still sort of confused why prep materials and the real exam diverged so much.
einpoklum 2y ago
The odds are, that if you go looking for any one of multiple low-probability events, one of them will be found to have happened.
gmaster1440 2y 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?
- anvuong 2y ago
  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.
- verbify 2y ago
  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.
  - energy123 2y ago
    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.
    - AnimalMuppet 2y ago
      The dear leader wasn't chosen for his ability, either, but for his loyalty to the previous dear leader.
- aaplok 2y ago
  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.
  - 2y ago
a0123 2y ago
[flagged]
- tryauuum 2y ago
  I don't understand your logic. "The easiest thing to do" is to do less thinking, less mathematical operations
- educasean 2y ago
  Many instances of numerical manipulations end up being discovered because the cheater didn't understand math well enough to hide their tracks correctly. See this link for a recent example that's been on my mind: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mnet_vote_manipulation_investigation https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mnet_vote_manipulation_inves... Basically, they just grabbed a random-looking numerical constant and used its multiples as the difference between vote numbers.
- michaelmrose 2y ago
  I have always called the argument that someone couldn't have possibly done it because it would be stupid to have done so the "Connie Defense" after a woman who tried to assert same before I picked her up and put her out of the house like Fred Flinstones cat. This was after she was caught driving without a license while speeding and smoking weed in a state where it was still illegal.
colimbarna 2y ago
Thanks. Note to self: Next time I want to rig election results, generate a random integer between 54.2% and 54.3% of the vote and count it as the winner's vote, subtract from total pool, wash rinse repeat.
- sien 2y ago
  It's remarkable that they don't do this. The sheer incompetence of the Maduro government and other governments that rig election results is surprising.
  - dinobones 2y ago
    So there are 2 things that may not make this no longer so surprising. 1) The Maduro government is more like a large gang that is holding a population hostage, than a government. All major businesses/imports/exports are owned by people connected to the Maduro regime. They are extorting remissions out of the population because they're the only ones who can import products. The government is so incompetent, it no longer has sufficient machinery or brains to operate their petroleum extractors, so instead they've pursued the more lucrative method of drug smuggling. The upper echelons of military are in on it and are all very individually wealthy, the lower echelons are brainwashed, but still well compensated for a "government" employee in Venezuela. Think $100 month vs $3 a month. This "government" will never give this up. They make too much money, and they have bought out the military. They can't just peacefully go away, or they will be tried for their crimes in any major nation. Almost every country has placed sanctions on various high level individuals from the government and frozen all of their assets. 2) There are no intellects in this government. The socialists that fought violently in the 90s that had little/no education rose up the ranks and are now extravagantly rich and powerful. Imagine if you took a bus driver and made him the dictator of a country. That is exactly what happened, Maduro was literally a bus driver. This is not to disparage bus drivers, they're fine people, but countries should be ran by experts. Economists, politicians, lawyers, people with some form of education. They don't understand economics. They don't understand engineering. Almost all of the intellectual work of the country is outsourced to Chinese or Russians. The entire country is being held hostage by people who have about a 3rd grade education, and that's being generous. But it's because they have guns, and money. But mostly the guns.
TechDebtDevin 2y ago
[flagged]
zyklu5 2y ago
This is not correct since you can claim the above for any number of votes actually obtained (if you asked someone to pick a number from 1 to 10 million, any number the person picks (assuming iid picks) will be by definition 10^-7). The problem is more subtle. There are around 10,000 integers n such that n/10058774 when rounded to 3 decimal places gives 0.512. Of those 10,000 this particular one has the smallest rounding error. That's what gives one the sense that probably they started with the clean fraction 0.512 and then worked their way to the tally.
agroot12 2y ago
You are right that it is unlikely that one candidate gets the number of votes that exactly matches a certain percentage with one decimal (1:10.000 as per the source article). But it's even more unlikely and astonishing that the second candidate also gets a number of votes corresponding to a percentage with one decimal! This is highly suspicious if the vote counts are presented as official result. But as mentioned in the comments, we cannot be sure that someone was given the total vote count, and the percentages rounded to one decimal, and thought it would be helpful to recalculate how many votes each candidate must have gotten.
- tptacek 2y ago
  The results we're discussing were read live by the president of the Venezuelan electoral authority. It is possible that they... simply read the wrong results? Like an internal estimate rather than the real numbers? But that is a wild mistake for the electoral authority to make. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41125031 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41125031
ajnin 2y ago
When I try to explain the issue, it boils down to this : the results look like they have been cooked. And the probability of that hapening by chance is 1 in 100 million. Mathematically, if votes are random, with 10,058,774 voters you have 10,058,774^2 ~= 1e14 possibilities of different results for 3 candidates (Maduro, Gonzalez and "Other"). On the other hand, the number of possible results that land exactly on the closest integer to be a round 0.1 percentage point is 1000^2 = 1e6. So the probability of the actual votes landing on a round 0.1 percentage point purely by chance is 1000^2/10,058,774^2 ~= 1 in 100 million. Of course the votes are not entirely random, but they have a random element, so it gives a rough idea of the reality.
Log_out_ 2y ago
You can also encode little ascii messages onto the fraction. 60,7097107101 % is the worlds smallest whistle

nikolay 2y ago

What's wrong with announcing results with rounded percentages?!

kadoban 2y ago
Nothing. The problem is when you obviously picked the rounded percentages that sounded good first and then calculated the number of votes from that.
- nikolay 2y ago
  Not necessarily. If the person announcing was given the number of votes and rounded percentages, then this could explain it. For example, in my country, they always report only turnout as a percentage with a single decimal and the share of each candidate/party with up to 2 decimals, never the number of votes - who cares about the absolute numbers anyway?
  - lxgr 2y ago
    But they did report the absolute number of votes.
    - nikolay 2y ago
      Where? In a tweet?
  - kadoban 2y ago
    A possibility, but not a good one. Depending on your goal, you either care a _lot_ about the raw number (in which case doing that calculation is _insane_), or you don't care really at all (so...why would you calculate it?).
  - forgetfulness 2y ago
    The thing is, that the absolute number of votes work out to give the announced percentage with 6 decimal digits, just as if they put "51.2%" on a calculator and worked backwards. The point is that they didn't actually round the percentage, it was actually 51.199999 for the President and 44.199999 for the opposition, the only credible explanation is that they picked the percentages and then cooked the absolute numbers to line up, so the numbers look "ugly", but the percentages are neat.
    - foobarqux 2y 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.
      - lolinder 2y ago
        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.
        foobarqux 2y ago
        Because voting results are universally reported as percentages, that's what everyone uses and understands.
        lolinder 2y ago
        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.
  - marcosdumay 2y ago
    That's a really bad thing and a reason not to trust the entire system. They should report the absolute number of votes at each counting station.
    - nikolay 2y ago
      I am talking about publicizing on media - the raw data of Bulgarian elections is available for download in real time during the counting and afterward [0], including the scanned protocols of each polling station and the video recording, which is now required. Even if the voting is electronic in particular (well, most) stations, there's still a paper protocol signed by the members of the section's committee. A tweet, an article, or a chart on TV doesn't prove anything, as they are not official documents. [0]: https://results.cik.bg/ https://results.cik.bg/
      - marcosdumay 2y ago
        Well, nobody else is talking about the headline numbers. That was the miscommunication.
KennyBlanken 2y ago
It's...rarely to never done? The exact counts are nearly always provided by voting officials. The press might summarize an election in whole numbers and maybe round up, but...that's very different from voting officials doing it.
paxys 2y ago
The didn’t announce the percentages, they announced the vote counts.
- nikolay 2y ago
  Why is that article not pointing to the source? I've looked for it, and I couldn't find it.
  - kgwgk 2y ago
    https://x.com/yvangil/status/1817787106237743565 https://x.com/yvangil/status/1817787106237743565
    - nikolay 2y ago
      I don't see the total number of votes/ballots. Is the vote in Venezuela 100% electronic? If not, there might be invalid paper ballots, too.
      - olalonde 2y ago
        They are read aloud by the presenter in Spanish (both total votes and percentages). You can also see them in the tweet if you don't speak Spanish. The announcer appears to represent the national electoral council (Consejo Nacional Electoral), so it's unlikely that he didn't have access to the exact counts (and had to compute them from percentages).
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
a0123 2y ago
[flagged]
- devnullbrain 2y ago
  In western democracies, among others, we use "" to denote that we are quoting somebody.
- killingtime74 2y ago
  In western countries power is handed over routinely amongst political enemies. So what, the incumbent is cooking the books to give power to their rival? If power is being handed over, where is the book cooking? Here they are staying in power. You think the Liberals in Australia wanted to give power over to Labor? You think Obama liked having Trump follow him? Macron cooked the votes so his own party lost the majority?
- noduerme 2y ago
  Or maybe western democracies do demand higher standards of transparency. Notice which countries called to congratulate Maduro immediately without waiting a day to find out if any the announced results were valid: Russia, Iran and Cuba. Paragons of liberty.
- stoperaticless 2y ago
  s/(non-)?western//g > See when democracies do it, it's ¨just to make it simpler" > When dictatorships do it, it's "fraud". Seems plausible. Credentials and reputation matter.

KennyBlanken 2y ago

It's called "digit tests" and it was further theorized that the last digit had a particularly even distribution in natural, honest elections. Further research showed that last digit test wasn't very good - there are multiple obvious counters to the test.

lolinder 2y ago
This isn't a digit test, though—the giveaway here isn't a problem with the last digit (or any single digit), the giveaway is that the vote tallies reported exactly match what you would arrive at if you attempted to derive them from nice round 3-digit percentages.

tomp 2y ago

My favourite part of my math education, solutions were always nice. Compute the eigenvalues of a random-looking (but still integers) 4x4 matrix? Oh, it's sqrt(2), I probably didn't make an error in the calculation. Then came the advanced physics / mechanics exam. It threw a wrench into our beautiful system. The results were just about anything, incredibly ugly, like the real world :yuck: :vomit:

ertgbnm 2y ago
Except in the real world we are allowed to offload the computation to a computer and have more time to double check things. Nice solutions are necessary due to time and resource constraints that exist within an educational setting.
amelius 2y ago
Tests should have checksums built into the correct answers.
timthorn 2y ago
> Oh, it's sqrt(2), I probably didn't make an error in the calculation You remind me of my university maths exam. In all the past papers, the eigenvalues came out to be round numbers. But in the real paper I sat, no matter how many times I tried to find my mistake, they didn't. I wasted hours of the exam on that. It was the professor's final year before his retirement.
- twright0 2y ago
  The year that I took AP Physics, every single piece of study material and practice test exercised only really simple math - small numbers, everything cleanly worked out into integers, etc etc. I did almost everything in my head or with quick notes on paper. This pattern was so consistent I almost didn't bring my calculator into the actual exam because I hadn't needed it all year, and grabbed it only at the last second "just in case". Turns out that was not a design goal of the real exam and basically nothing worked out to neat, small integer solutions - I probably would have hard failed without the calculator. I'm still sort of confused why prep materials and the real exam diverged so much.

einpoklum 2y ago

The odds are, that if you go looking for any one of multiple low-probability events, one of them will be found to have happened.

gmaster1440 2y 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?

anvuong 2y ago
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.
verbify 2y ago
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.
- energy123 2y ago
  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.
  - AnimalMuppet 2y ago
    The dear leader wasn't chosen for his ability, either, but for his loyalty to the previous dear leader.
aaplok 2y ago
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.
- 2y ago

a0123 2y ago

[flagged]

tryauuum 2y ago
I don't understand your logic. "The easiest thing to do" is to do less thinking, less mathematical operations
educasean 2y ago
Many instances of numerical manipulations end up being discovered because the cheater didn't understand math well enough to hide their tracks correctly. See this link for a recent example that's been on my mind: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mnet_vote_manipulation_investigation https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mnet_vote_manipulation_inves... Basically, they just grabbed a random-looking numerical constant and used its multiples as the difference between vote numbers.
michaelmrose 2y ago
I have always called the argument that someone couldn't have possibly done it because it would be stupid to have done so the "Connie Defense" after a woman who tried to assert same before I picked her up and put her out of the house like Fred Flinstones cat. This was after she was caught driving without a license while speeding and smoking weed in a state where it was still illegal.

colimbarna 2y ago

Thanks. Note to self: Next time I want to rig election results, generate a random integer between 54.2% and 54.3% of the vote and count it as the winner's vote, subtract from total pool, wash rinse repeat.

sien 2y ago
It's remarkable that they don't do this. The sheer incompetence of the Maduro government and other governments that rig election results is surprising.
- dinobones 2y ago
  So there are 2 things that may not make this no longer so surprising. 1) The Maduro government is more like a large gang that is holding a population hostage, than a government. All major businesses/imports/exports are owned by people connected to the Maduro regime. They are extorting remissions out of the population because they're the only ones who can import products. The government is so incompetent, it no longer has sufficient machinery or brains to operate their petroleum extractors, so instead they've pursued the more lucrative method of drug smuggling. The upper echelons of military are in on it and are all very individually wealthy, the lower echelons are brainwashed, but still well compensated for a "government" employee in Venezuela. Think $100 month vs $3 a month. This "government" will never give this up. They make too much money, and they have bought out the military. They can't just peacefully go away, or they will be tried for their crimes in any major nation. Almost every country has placed sanctions on various high level individuals from the government and frozen all of their assets. 2) There are no intellects in this government. The socialists that fought violently in the 90s that had little/no education rose up the ranks and are now extravagantly rich and powerful. Imagine if you took a bus driver and made him the dictator of a country. That is exactly what happened, Maduro was literally a bus driver. This is not to disparage bus drivers, they're fine people, but countries should be ran by experts. Economists, politicians, lawyers, people with some form of education. They don't understand economics. They don't understand engineering. Almost all of the intellectual work of the country is outsourced to Chinese or Russians. The entire country is being held hostage by people who have about a 3rd grade education, and that's being generous. But it's because they have guns, and money. But mostly the guns.

TechDebtDevin 2y ago

[flagged]

zyklu5 2y ago

This is not correct since you can claim the above for any number of votes actually obtained (if you asked someone to pick a number from 1 to 10 million, any number the person picks (assuming iid picks) will be by definition 10^-7). The problem is more subtle. There are around 10,000 integers n such that n/10058774 when rounded to 3 decimal places gives 0.512. Of those 10,000 this particular one has the smallest rounding error. That's what gives one the sense that probably they started with the clean fraction 0.512 and then worked their way to the tally.

agroot12 2y ago

You are right that it is unlikely that one candidate gets the number of votes that exactly matches a certain percentage with one decimal (1:10.000 as per the source article). But it's even more unlikely and astonishing that the second candidate also gets a number of votes corresponding to a percentage with one decimal! This is highly suspicious if the vote counts are presented as official result. But as mentioned in the comments, we cannot be sure that someone was given the total vote count, and the percentages rounded to one decimal, and thought it would be helpful to recalculate how many votes each candidate must have gotten.

tptacek 2y ago
The results we're discussing were read live by the president of the Venezuelan electoral authority. It is possible that they... simply read the wrong results? Like an internal estimate rather than the real numbers? But that is a wild mistake for the electoral authority to make. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41125031 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41125031

ajnin 2y ago

When I try to explain the issue, it boils down to this : the results look like they have been cooked. And the probability of that hapening by chance is 1 in 100 million. Mathematically, if votes are random, with 10,058,774 voters you have 10,058,774^2 ~= 1e14 possibilities of different results for 3 candidates (Maduro, Gonzalez and "Other"). On the other hand, the number of possible results that land exactly on the closest integer to be a round 0.1 percentage point is 1000^2 = 1e6. So the probability of the actual votes landing on a round 0.1 percentage point purely by chance is 1000^2/10,058,774^2 ~= 1 in 100 million. Of course the votes are not entirely random, but they have a random element, so it gives a rough idea of the reality.

Log_out_ 2y ago

You can also encode little ascii messages onto the fraction. 60,7097107101 % is the worlds smallest whistle