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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 al

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).
- mateuspires 2y ago
  Finally some good explanation
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.

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).
mateuspires 2y ago
Finally some good explanation

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.