[stapled_socks]

To play the devil's advocate: It's possible that the person making the announcement was only given the rounded percentages and the total number of votes, and then "created" the number of votes per candidate to fit to the format of the announcement. That would be sloppy, but not malicious.

[worstspotgain]

It's technically possible that that was not their weed and their meth in their pants because those were not their pants. However when they have a mile-long rap sheet for selling drugs, it weakens their argument a bit.

[culi]

What's the mile long rap sheet though? The group that's alleging fraud (AltaVista) is using images of printed receipts from different voting places as a sample to estimate the final vote. That group also said it's same technique resulted in election outcomes that are within 2 points or less of the announced outcome for 2021, 2018, and 2015.

This seems like a new and unique accusation for Venezuela

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/31/world/americas/venezuela-...

[JumpCrisscross]

> What's the mile long rap sheet though?

Venezuela’s terrible electoral record post Chavez.

[dmix]

And the fact the gov quietly funds roving mobs of bike gangs to intimidate the populace. On top of that they completely control 10% of the Venezulas cities.

> Human Rights Watch described colectivos as "armed gangs who use violence with impunity" to harass political opponents of the Venezuelan government.[10][11] Amnesty International calls them "armed pro-government supporters who are tolerated or supported by the authorities".[12] Colectivos have attacked anti-government protesters[1] and Venezuelan opposition television staff, sent death threats to journalists, and once tear-gassed the Vatican envoy.[10] Through violence and intimidation, by 2019 colectivos increasingly became a means of quashing the opposition and maintaining political power;[9][13] Maduro called on them during the 2019 Venezuelan blackouts.[14][15]

And that in poor areas these armed gangs are directly involved in bringing people to voting stations

> Every member of a colectivo is required to bring ten individuals to vote at polls during elections.[34] Over time, colectivos became more heavily armed and their criminal activity increased.[3] A small number of groups maintain community and cultural functions; most are "criminal gangs with immense social control", who "work alongside the security forces, often doing their dirty work for them", according to InSight Crime.[6] Members can be difficult to identify because they often wear masks and do not have license plates on their motorcycles.[9]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colectivo_(Venezuela)

The fact there were armed guards around the voting stations

[throwaway59148]

We are meant to believe that Maduro outperformed his exit polling by twenty percentage points. Source: https://www.foreignaffairs.com/venezuela/venezuela-elections...

If you have serious doubts about whether the election was fair (it wasn't,) I'd encourage you to read the whole article as a primer on how and why the election was conducted and what it might mean for Venezuela going forward.

[olalonde]

It seems Maduro was way behind in the polls.

https://www.as-coa.org/articles/poll-tracker-venezuelas-2024...

[culi]

Depends which polls you're looking at. So far, no non-US-linked pollsters have shown Maduro behind (that is, behind the US backed opposition candidate). If you look at something like Hinterlaces you get a very different picture

[olalonde]

According to this Venezuelan news article[0], several did:

> Well-known pollsters in the Venezuelan political sphere, such as Datanálisis, Datincorp, Delphos, and Consultores 21, along with the emerging Poder y Estrategia, indicated that Urrutia had more than 50% of voting intentions.

[0] https://www.lapatilla.com/2024/07/15/la-guerra-de-encuestas-...

[culi]

Thanks for the article. I had to translate as my Spanish isn't very good. These seem to be the main points

> Surveys of career-marking firms in the Venezuelan political environment, such as Datanalisis, Datincorp, Delphos and Consultores 21, as well as the incipient Power and Strategy, by political scientist Ricardo Ríos, claim that the postulate of anti-chavismo accumulates more than 50 percent of the intention to vote.

> However, others, such as Hinterlaces and some practically unknown in the Venezuelan or recent data market, including Polymarket, BMI Orientation and DataViva, conclude that Maduro leads his surveys with between 54 percent and 70 percent of the preference. Another, ECSC, talks about a technical tie tipped slightly towards opposition.

> The C-INFORMA Information Coalition, made up of media teams such as Media-analysis, Cocuyo Effect, Fake News Hunters and Probox, concluded this month that 6 out of 14 firms evaluated, recently created and dubious credibility, have published 37 public opinion studies - used in a strategy - to manipulate the country's.

The main point of the article seems to be that there's a lot of misleading polling in general. Which is a fair point, but does kinda leave us outsiders in the dark

[mihaaly]

True in general, but here "the President of the National Electoral Commission announced the winner". Sloppy in this situation equals malicious. And I wonder who gave the president the numbers to calculate with. ; )

[culi]

Sure, and it's only "80%" (another sloppy-looking number) of the count, but these numbers are still useful in that it'd be an insurmountable lead. Independent decision desks don't wait for exact final tallies to call a race. It will likely take weeks for every single vote to be fully counted.

I agree this is at least sloppy work though. Apparently the explanation for the delay in full results is an ongoing cyber attack

[olalonde]

Unlikely, the person making the announcement was an official from the national electoral council (Consejo Nacional Electoral). There's no reason the national electoral council wouldn't have access to the exact counts and would have to work their way backwards from percentages.

Source: https://x.com/yvangil/status/1817787106237743565

[arendtio]

You say 'unlikely'. But the real question is 'how likely'.

Without accounting for the probability of such an event, the whole analysis isn't worth much.

[foobarqux]

Yes but that guy certainly didn't tally the votes himself, someone gave him the numbers (and someone else gave him those numbers). It's plausible that in some step only the (rounded) percentages and overall total were given and then someone downstream imputed the counts.

[olalonde]

It's possible but not very plausible. Why would the official organization charged with overseeing the elections knowingly report inaccurate numbers when it has access to the accurate numbers?

[foobarqux]

Because maybe they didn't have direct access to the original numbers? You can't understand that some consumer of the data might not get the original CSV only some summary?

[lolinder]

A summary that includes the exact number of votes cast and the percent for each candidate but not the breakdown by candidate?

Why would someone go out of their way to construct a CSV that has the tally by candidate removed* but still has the total vote count? What would that CSV even look like?

* Yes, the tally would have to be removed, because presumably there's a spreadsheet somewhere that was used to generate percentages from tallies.

[foobarqux]

Yes, the percentages are the most important number, the number everyone is interested in. The next most important number is the voter turnout. You can verify this by looking at the newspaper headlines of any election. Again unless you are an electioneer no one cares about the raw numbers so it would not be surprising that only the percentages and total are communicated to the public relations department.

I don't understand your comments about the CSV: I'm saying that the raw CSV is not being distributed, only the summary statistics.

[q1w2]

That would mean that the group that released the percentage, and thus calculated it, was a different group than the one that released the raw numbers. That doesn't seem likely since they seem to be coming from the same gov't body.

This is an official election release, not some PR post on their website.

[foobarqux]

Big departments have lots of people, made up of smaller groups, they are not monoliths with a single mind.

[nikolay]

I've never seen any preliminary results announcing numbers of votes - it's always rounded up percentages with 1 or 2 decimals.

[yongjik]

In my country (Korea) they broadcast vote counts, per district, in real time as data pours in from all over the country. It's a big entertainment going on for the whole night. And you can log onto the website of the office of the election commission and see raw numbers by each voting district.

It's 2024; I'd consider it a minimum level of government competency if anyone wants to be called a democratic country.

[HPsquared]

This process led to a lot of controversy in the 2020 US Presidential election.

[lumb63]

As an American, boy, do I have news for you…

[zamadatix]

I'd say it's extremely common to announce numbers of votes both as they come in and when the final total is known. Here in the US major news networks (ABC, CNN, Fox, 270towin, and others) all have live maps that show the total number of votes + total percentages during the voting period. They usually also let you hover over the states/counties to see the percentages and votes for the particular area.

E.g. here's the Fox map https://www.foxnews.com/elections/2020/general-results and total votes comes first in the same font as percentages marked to the side. During the election these totals and percentages are live numbers.

And in the US we're not even that interested in the popular vote since it's all about the electoral college which has historically not always aligned with the popular vote numbers anyways yet we still list the totals as they come in.

[ptero]

If the vote numbers were not provided, this would not have been an issue. But in this case they did announce the vote numbers.

[shusaku]

The article has been updated to mention this theory

> Commenter Ryan points out that you could also explain this data pattern as a result of sloppy post-processing, if votes were counted correctly, then reported to the nearest percentage point, and then some intermediary mistakenly multiplied the (rounded) percentages by the total vote and reported that. I have no idea; you'd want to know where those particular numbers were coming from.

I’m inclined to believe this. It seems like if they had some grand conspiracy it’d be more likely for them to just add some votes here and there to the real number.

[__MatrixMan__]

I hope you're right. If there's anything more insulting than having an election tampered with, it's having it tampered with... poorly. Like, you couldn't even bother to lie precisely?

[HPsquared]

That's the story we'll hear anyway, regardless of what actually happened.