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What are the odds, II: the Venezuelan presidential election
- mmastrac 2y agoTL;DR, and this took a while to parse out, but the post suggests a highly unlikely event that the vote was accurate. > The numerical anomaly is that if one multiplies the total number of voters {10,058,774} by the round percentages {51.2\%}, {44.2\%}, {4.6\%}, one recovers exactly the above vote counts after rounding to the nearest integer: ... > giving credence to the theory of the election report being manipulated (though it is possible that the manipulation could occur through a third hypothesis {H_2} not covered by the original two hypotheses, such as a software glitch
- thaumasiotes 2y ago> this took a while to parse out Andrew Gelman's post on the counts is better written: https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2024/07/31/suspicious-data-pattern-in-recent-venezuelan-election/ https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2024/07/31/suspicious... (The description and the conclusion aren't different; it's just easier to read.)
- gnabgib 2y agoRelated Suspicious data pattern in recent Venezuelan election (886 points, 3 days ago, 514 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41123155 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41123155
- billforsternz 2y agoOne hesitates to criticize the great man but, as mmastrac has already pointed out, it's really difficult to parse out a conclusion, especially a straightforward probability estimate. I was hoping for something like; "The probability of these apparently fake numbers being genuine is in the range 1/1500 to 1/130,000, depending on what other assumptions we make". Maybe that's impossible in the same way that talking about the improbability of a shuffle revealing some specific series of cards says nothing about the reality of one such sequence after it's revealed.
- seventytwo 2y agoThat’s exactly the conclusion, except it’s 1 in 100 million. You’d need to run that election 100 million times to expect an outcome with vote totals that landed on percentages that all rounded to exactly 0.1.
- billforsternz 2y agoThanks, I wish that was stated a little more clearly is the source document.
- cassianoleal 2y agoThat's not quite it though, is it? It more like, if you run that election 100 million times, it's very likely that these kinds of results would happen only once. That once could be in the very first time you ran the elections, it could be in the 100 millionth, or anywhere in between.
- seventytwo 2y agoYes. That’s what “expected outcome” means.
- cassianoleal 2y agoI was responding to > You’d need to run that election 100 million times You don't. It might happen the very first time. It's as probable to happen this time as it is in any of the other 100 million times.
- osigurdson 2y agoHave to drop anonymity from voting. Yes, I know there are down sides but large scale corruption on a transparent system is difficult.
- infotainment 2y agoFun fact: North Korea uses non-anonymous voting and it works great! 100% turnout, and the party-selected winners always win! You’re always free to non-anonymously vote for another candidate of course. What could go wrong?
- osigurdson 2y agoNo voting system can overcome such a regime on its own. I don't even know why NK bothers with elections. They should just claim they are a monarchy, ordained by God. No one believes their election results anyway.
- brendoelfrendo 2y agoAbsolutely the hell not. Secret ballots are integral to free and fair elections. Once you lose anonymity, you open the door to a whole host of other issues, including the obvious potential for political oppression.
- patrick451 2y agoAnonymous elections aren't working either.
- cassianoleal 2y agoSo, throw out the baby with the bath water?
- mbrumlow 2y agoYes.
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- A1kmm 2y agoNot vouching for the election result, however, some kind of correction for multiple comparisons is probably needed here. There are a lot of different ways in which election results can 'look fishy', especially if you take combinations of different districts looking suspicious into account, and so on. Looking at digit distributions (Benford's Law) of various numbers (total votes, percentage), looking at exact numbers of votes, looking at exact percentages of votes, errors looking too much like a normal distribution or some other theoretical distribution, etc... Since Terry Tao likely heard about this particular proposed anomaly and then looked into it, there is a selection bias: if a different metric had looked fishy, it would have been reported instead. But it is hard to know how many different things were looked at and not reported on because there was no anomaly. The end result is effectively cherry-picking the one thing that looks worst, and then doing statistics on that without all the other negative results being corrected for. This sort of thing plagues a lot of statistical research unfortunately. That's not to say there was necessarily integrity in the Venezuelan election, but this type of analysis has to be taken with a grain of salt.