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On election day, Venezuela’s government-owned electoral authority CNE has, after an unusually long delay, pulled figures out of its hat that after 80 per cent of the votes had been counted, it was clear that Nicolás Maduro had won the presidential election with 51 per cent of the votes. No reliable, verifiable data was published. You would simply have to believe this figure - but please don’t! 🤯 I’ll explain why not here.

No rounding error in fake results

Here’s a video explanation of this part:

Let’s begin with an error so stupid and incompetent it fries your brain. The numbers the CNE initially published on election day, on the basis of which it was proclaimed that Maduro had won the election, are self-evidently fake. Here they are:

Imagine how these numbers would come about if they were legitimate:

1. Count the votes
2. Do the calculations for the percentages
3. Round the percentages to one decimal place

So if we were to do the calculations for, say, Maduro, the given percentage 51.2% means that the raw result of the calculation is anywhere between 51.15% and 51.2499999…%, because any of these numbers in between would be rounded to 51.2%.

So, what raw result do you get when you actually do the calculations?

You get the exact percentage without any rounding error up to five decimal places! It’s only on the sixth decimal place that you get a tiny error.

Given that 51.2% could have been anywhere between 51.15% and 51.2499999…%, we can calculate the likelihood that the result should be this exact. It’s a simple question: Given five decimal places, how many possible results are there that would be rounded to 51.2%? Imagine a list like this:

51.15000% 51.15001% 51.15002% … 52.24997% 52.24998% 52.24999%

How long is this list? It’s 10’000 possible results long. In other words: The chance is 1:10’000 to pick any one specific result by chance. To get three exact results like the CNE got is 1:10’000³, so 1:10¹², which is one in a billion… You’re more likely to win most lotteries 30’000 times in a row… 🤷

What’s the obvious explanation? The CNE first decided on the percentage and then filled in the vote count to get those percentages.

Quick explanation of the electronic election system

The core of Venezuela’s semi-automatic election system is in principle very robust and is based on the fact that votes can be verified independently. Two important key points on election day are:

1. At polling stations, registered witnesses and voters have the right to receive the vote count from the voting machines (the “actas de escrutinio”) at the end of election day. Here is an example of a machine:
2. The electoral authority should publish the data broken down by voting centre and voting machine. With the above-mentioned vote counts of the machines (‘actas’), everyone can then check the data regardless of their opinion.

The electoral authority has repeatedly broken the applicable electoral law in both places. (This is a theoretical accusation, because Hugo Chávez already subjugated the independence of the judiciary in 2004. Breaking the law has no consequences for the government.)

1: Access to polling centres denied & vote counts not issued

Opposition witnesses and voters were denied vote counts (“actas”) from voting centres. Nevertheless, the opposition was able to collect over 80 percent of the “actas” and published them on https://resultadosconvzla.com/.

According to these “actas”, opposition candidate Edmundo González Urrutia received 67 percent of the vote and Maduro 30 per cent.

That the published “actas” are added up correctly has been independently verified by several organisations, including the Assocated Press.

Needless to say: If just one acta were fake, the dictatorship would jump on it.

The autocracy, clearly alarmed by this strategy, attempted to make it impossible on election day. The main witness of the democratic opposition, Delsa Solórzano, said on election day: “In a large number of voting centres, our witnesses were sent away. They were forced to leave.” In addition, staff in many voting centres refused to issue the ‘actas’. “They don’t print the ‘actas’, which is why the results are not transmitted … so the transmission was paralysed. And, yes, this is already a pattern.”

Ultimately, as I said above, the opposition managed to scrape over 80 percent of the actas. Disobedience of election staff and military units helped in some cases.

Numerous “actas” are visible in photos and videos on Twitter. González consistently gets twice as many votes as Maduro - or more. This is in line with credible opinion polls before election day.

2: Data not published

The electoral authority has so far only claimed results and has not published any reliable data. But only with disaggregated data by voting centre and voting machine could the election be verified!

On election day, it’s worth noting that the political representatives of the opposition were denied access to the election centre despite repeated attempts. “Last time I was told it would be better if we withdrew - for our safety,” said the main witness of the democratic opposition, Delsa Solórzano. Video of an attempt to enter the centre. According to Eugenio Martínez, two technical witnesses from the opposition were allowed into the centre. I don’t know any more about that.

Head of only independent election observers: All “know” Edmundo won

The only international election observers that were invited by the autocracy was the Carter Center. They published numerous deficiencies also in the run up to the elections (which I covered in this Video) and concluded that the elections “did not meet international standards of electoral integrity and cannot be considered democratic”.

Jennie Lincoln, the head of mission of the Carter Center in Venezuela even confirmed on two occasions that Edmundo won. “The government, the government’s political party and the opposition know that Edmundo Gonzalez won the election by almost two to one”, she said to NPR.

Agence France-Presse also talked to her and reported: “The center ‘ran the same numbers’ from the available data that the opposition used and — along with other organizations and universities — confirmed Gonzalez as the winner with more than 60% of the vote.”

Post-election polls and surveys see González as the winner

Edison Research published a post-election poll showing that Gonzalez received 65 per cent of the vote, while Maduro received 31 per cent. The firm conducts high-profile election polls in the United States and other countries. “The official results are ridiculous,” Edison Executive Vice President Rob Farbman said in an email to Reuters, explaining that they stand by the results of the poll. Edison’s poll was conducted nationwide with preliminary data from 6,846 voters interviewed at 100 polling stations.

The Venezuelan company Meganalisis also published a post-election poll and predicted 65 per cent of the vote for Gonzalez and just under 14 per cent for Maduro.

Hacking is likely a fake, too

The CNE claims they were hacked and that’s the reason they still haven’t published any results. That’s not credible for the following reasons:

• The Carter Center’s deputy chief of mission in Venezuela, Patricio Ballados, said: “An attack via the internet was practically impossible, because what they had were dedicated channels only for the transmission of data from the National Electoral Council, and that, a few days before the election, was offered by the authority as one of the safeguards and one of the greatest strengths of the system”. In simple terms: The election network is not connected to the internet.
• There’s some technical reasons that suggest it’s the regime itself that took down the CNE website.