4 ms·

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.
        foobarqux 2y 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).
  - 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.

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.
        foobarqux 2y 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).
- 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.