Not 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 w

Not 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.