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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

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).
        lolinder 2y ago
        > 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.
        mannykannot 2y ago
        > 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.
    - tptacek 2y ago
      Reporting just the percentages makes sense. Reporting rounded versions of those percentages not only makes sense, but is the universal idiom for reporting percentages. But reporting synthesized vote counts from the percentages --- even from non-rounded percentages --- is not normal. People on this thread are hung up on the reported percentages, but those don't matter in this analysis at all. They're not the problem. The problem is the counts themselves. Discard the reported percentages entirely; exact same critique, one statistics students would spot instantly.
      - foobarqux 2y ago
        Maybe I don't understand what you have identified as the problem. My understanding of the article is that the raw tallies should not correspond to "precise" rounded percentages. The article in an addendum points out one way that could legitimately occur (some underling has the totals and rounded percentages but needs the raw tallies and naively multiplies to get them).
        tptacek 2y 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.
        kelipso 2y ago
        > 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.
mateuspires 2y ago
Finally some good explanation

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).
      - lolinder 2y ago
        > 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.
      - mannykannot 2y ago
        > 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.
  - tptacek 2y ago
    Reporting just the percentages makes sense. Reporting rounded versions of those percentages not only makes sense, but is the universal idiom for reporting percentages. But reporting synthesized vote counts from the percentages --- even from non-rounded percentages --- is not normal. People on this thread are hung up on the reported percentages, but those don't matter in this analysis at all. They're not the problem. The problem is the counts themselves. Discard the reported percentages entirely; exact same critique, one statistics students would spot instantly.
    - foobarqux 2y ago
      Maybe I don't understand what you have identified as the problem. My understanding of the article is that the raw tallies should not correspond to "precise" rounded percentages. The article in an addendum points out one way that could legitimately occur (some underling has the totals and rounded percentages but needs the raw tallies and naively multiplies to get them).
      - tptacek 2y 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.
        kelipso 2y ago
        > 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.

mateuspires 2y ago

Finally some good explanation