Anti-government activists across Venezuela are toppling giant statues of Hugo Chávez to express their anger over the alleged stealing of an election by the late president’s handpicked successor, Nicolás Maduro.
Anti-government activists across Venezuela are toppling giant statues of Hugo Chávez to express their anger over the alleged stealing of an election by the late president’s handpicked successor, Nicolás Maduro.
Venezuelan here. It’s difficult to understand if you are not familiar with Venezuelan law, but bear with me.
We vote electronically. There’s a registry of citizens, paired with biometric data, so everyone votes only once. Every ID is linked to a single voting center, and a single voting poll within that center. Each voting machine will only let people registered to vote there. Each person who votes is given a tiny paper receipt that they must personally deposit in a voting urn. At the end of the election there’s a tally, electronic, the machine then prints that tally along with several cryptographic hashes. These hashes are a mix of poll station authorities keys and the numbers reported. Every poll station has authorities and witnesses from each party. This tallies and copies of them are distributed to these people and to as many people as there is print paper and ink available. Lay people are allowed to witness said process and keep a copy of the tally, with only limits to the building’s capacity and material available. Finally, the machine transmits the same data as in the tally papers via an internet encrypted connection to a single totalization center. Then each center is free to audit the tallies by opening the urns in one or all the poll stations and count them by hand to make sure it matches the electronic tally.
There should be witnesses from each party inside the totalization center to see the process of totalization live. Then the election authorities must print the bulletins from the totalization center and publish the results in their entirety, proclaim the results etc. All of this is constitutional law.
Now, for what really happened. At several voting centers witnessed were forbidden from keeping printed tallies. Some places even used violence from the armed forces. Witnesses from all parties except two where forbidden to enter the totalization center by intelligence forces right at the door. The results transmission was halted by the electoral authorities at 20% of data transmitted, no explanation given (they alleged later that North Macedonia hacked the system, I’m not kidding). Then, one of the only witnesses allowed inside claims that the results with Maduro winning read by the electoral president were not printed inside the totalization center, but elsewhere. This is illegal. The results announced were allegedly with 60% of the data. The announcement claims that the results were irreversible. This a technical term, defined by law and statistical sciences, that means that even if the losing candidate had 75% or more of the remaining votes it would not alter the announced winner. But this was not true, for the data as announced.
Now, for how the fraud is being proven. The opposition leader worked for months on creating a network of witnesses with the sole job of gathering printed tallies from each and every polling station at the end of the voting. This tallies were digitized and given to the opposition party for them to totalize on their own. This data was published today on a web page with roughly 80% of the tallies from all polling stations obtained. They show an entirely different result than what the electoral authority claims. Each cryptographic hash is visible and verifiable. People with tallies have been checking and proving that they are consistent with what they have and the hashes match correctly.
Finally, the election authority certified Maduro without publishing the detailed results by polling station. This is also illegal, as certification of results must only happen with 100% of the results tallied and published. Today the web page of the CNE remains offline and no detailed results can be officially seen. This is why most Democratic governments and international institutions are calling for the government to publish the tallies fully, as is our law.
Que rabia da lo que sucedió y es algo que personalmente no espero que los gringos o los demás angloparlantes aquí vayan a entender. Que un día lleguen elecciones justas a Venezuela.
Soy un gringo, y mi español es horrible, pero estoy enojado.
(Aunque la mayoría no leerá cosas como esta).
That seems pretty damning. I could certainly believe a hack (with the understanding that just because it seemed to come from N Macedonia that doesn’t mean it was the origin), but that doesn’t explain anything else.
Here’s a fun nerd mathematical sidetrack that proves the fraud further for anyone who is reading. Let’s talk percentages.
When we express a proportion of a number against a total we are making percentages. Element/Total * 100 = %. Usually, we get percentages with a lots of decimal places, proportions are rarely exact in real life, so we must round somehow if we want to report numbers with less decimals. This means that if we try to reverse the process, find out the numbers starting from the percentages, we get errors, as information was lost during rounding. This error is usually between the bounds of one percent point. It’s extremely rare for this process to be perfectly reversible.
When looking at the numbers announced by the electoral authority, however, this strange phenomena happens, not once, not twice, but three times. Let me show you. The results as announced were (official source):
You are free to do the math with me, step by step, get your calculator app out.
Hmmm
10058774/100 = 100587.74
So we could expect an error of anywhere from 50,000 votes over or under when we try to derive the totals from the percentages.
Oh my.
You can try this on your own with made up numbers and you’ll notice that it is almost impossible, statistically speaking, for this to happen.
Let’s run random numbers from random.org.
Lets’ get some percentages and round them for good measure:
That’s 100% right there, so let’s derive.
The percentage point is 61054.72
As you can see, we can’t derive the total from the percentages, as the percentages were rounded. The variation is well within the percent point error, but unless we have each and every single one of the decimal places of the percentages, we will never know the exact total the numbers come from (there are mathematical ways but they’re irrelevant in this analysis).
Looking at the numbers announced, we can only deduce that, statistically speaking, the votes were most likely calculated with exact percentages chosen before hand instead of the percentages being calculated from the votes then rounded. As it is an unlikely probability they were naturally exact.
They made up the results and announced them. There’s now plenty of proof that the election was stolen.
I would give you Lemmy gold if it existed. This is well-written and fascinating.
Disregard symbolic prizes, share this information with anyone within hear shot. Venezuela is a dictatorship and this election was stolen. People are being murdered in their homes right as we speak to keep a dictator in power. Call your government authorities and pressure them to take this matter seriously and put international pressure on Venezuela for this regime to end.
I’ve already shared your posts here a few times. I’m not sure what other levers my government has to effect change in Venezuela, but it can’t hurt.
Can you share the source of these vote totals? Would love to share this, but need the source to verify.
Yes, you see. Part of the problem is that the absolute only source for those numbers is what the president of the electoral power read during a press conference. Here’s a government news source quoting the announcement. There are no more numbers, or anywhere else to verify them. Not even during the proclamation act, the next day, were new numbers given or data updated. Just void rhetoric and crazy statements to deflect attention.
Thank you!