<story><title>Suspicious data pattern in recent Venezuelan election</title><url>https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2024/07/31/suspicious-data-pattern-in-recent-venezuelan-election/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>dinobones</author><text>Here&amp;#x27;s this re-explained with a simpler example.&lt;p&gt;Imagine you have 1,000 votes. You want to show that your political party got 60% of the vote, so, you claim:&lt;p&gt;My party: 600 votes
Opposition: 300 votes
Other: 100 votes&lt;p&gt;Presto, we got a good breakdown. The people will buy it....&lt;p&gt;It makes sense that 600 is exactly 60% of 1,000, because this was an artificial example.&lt;p&gt;But in the real world, we don&amp;#x27;t get 1,000 votes.&lt;p&gt;We get 10,058,774 votes. What are the odds that the % of votes you get is a round number like 60%, or 51.2%? They&amp;#x27;re infinitesimally small. You&amp;#x27;re much more likely to get ugly numbers, like 59.941323854% of the vote, unless you choose some artificial percentage and work backward.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>zyklu5</author><text>This is not correct since you can claim the above for any number of votes actually obtained (if you asked someone to pick a number from 1 to 10 million, any number the person picks (assuming iid picks) will be by definition 10^-7).&lt;p&gt;The problem is more subtle.&lt;p&gt;There are around 10,000 integers n such that n&amp;#x2F;10058774 when rounded to 3 decimal places gives 0.512. Of those 10,000 this particular one has the smallest rounding error. That&amp;#x27;s what gives one the sense that probably they started with the clean fraction 0.512 and then worked their way to the tally.</text></comment>
<story><title>Suspicious data pattern in recent Venezuelan election</title><url>https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2024/07/31/suspicious-data-pattern-in-recent-venezuelan-election/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>dinobones</author><text>Here&amp;#x27;s this re-explained with a simpler example.&lt;p&gt;Imagine you have 1,000 votes. You want to show that your political party got 60% of the vote, so, you claim:&lt;p&gt;My party: 600 votes
Opposition: 300 votes
Other: 100 votes&lt;p&gt;Presto, we got a good breakdown. The people will buy it....&lt;p&gt;It makes sense that 600 is exactly 60% of 1,000, because this was an artificial example.&lt;p&gt;But in the real world, we don&amp;#x27;t get 1,000 votes.&lt;p&gt;We get 10,058,774 votes. What are the odds that the % of votes you get is a round number like 60%, or 51.2%? They&amp;#x27;re infinitesimally small. You&amp;#x27;re much more likely to get ugly numbers, like 59.941323854% of the vote, unless you choose some artificial percentage and work backward.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>tomp</author><text>My favourite part of my math education, solutions were always nice.&lt;p&gt;Compute the eigenvalues of a random-looking (but still integers) 4x4 matrix? Oh, it&amp;#x27;s sqrt(2), I probably didn&amp;#x27;t make an error in the calculation.&lt;p&gt;Then came the advanced physics &amp;#x2F; mechanics exam. It threw a wrench into our beautiful system. The results were just about anything, incredibly ugly, like the real world :yuck: :vomit:</text></comment>