[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.

[lolinder]

> Yes, the percentages are the most important number, the number everyone is interested in.

Then why did the hypothetical sub-sub-librarian who put together the final spreadsheet feel the need to go back and repopulate those numbers? Clearly they thought people would want to see them, right?

> The next most important number is the voter turnout. You can verify this by looking at the newspaper headlines of any election.

So, in this hypothetical, when the tallies per candidate are expressed as percentages it's because percentages are the natural way to think about these things, but when voter turnout is expressed in raw numbers that's because raw numbers are the natural way to think about voter turnout?

Voter turnout is the only number in the set that I could possibly see making sense to express only as a percentage!

[foobarqux]

My recollection is that turnout is usually quoted in both percentage and absolute numbers but quoting it as a percentage requires external data (population demographics) which presumably isn't in the electioneering department.

Why do you have such a hard time believing that election results (e.g. for a union, for school president etc) might be communicated like "55 to 45, 3000 people voted"?