Suspicious data pattern in recent Venezuelan election

Statistical anomaly & why it’s suspicious

• Core concern: the reported vote counts correspond almost exactly to “nice” one-decimal percentages (≈51.2%, 44.2%, 4.6%), as if someone started with those percentages and back‑computed integer counts.
• Commenters stress: the issue is not that any exact outcome is unlikely, but that all three candidates land essentially on clean 0.1% increments.
• Several rough calculations put the chance of such alignment around 1 in 10⁸–10⁹, under broad assumptions about plausible vote distributions.
• Expanded to more decimals, the percentages look like 51.1999971%, 44.1999989%, 4.6000039%, which is exactly what you get if you take 0.512, 0.442, 0.046 times the total and round to the nearest vote.

Alternative benign explanations

• A recurring counter‑theory: an intermediary only had (rounded) percentages plus total votes and “reconstructed” per‑candidate tallies by multiplying and rounding, then passed these on for the TV announcement.
• Critics reply this still means the officially announced counts are fictitious; throwing away real tallies and re‑generating them is, at best, gross incompetence in an electoral authority.
• Debate centers on whether such a miscommunication chain inside the electoral council is plausible or vanishingly unlikely.

Provisional vs final results and data transparency

• Some note the numbers were labeled as ~“80% counted” provisional figures, arguing sloppiness is more likely there. Others say the improbability is unchanged: round percentages are just as unlikely at 80% as at 100%.
• Widespread frustration that the electoral authority has not published polling‑station‑level tallies as mandated, seen by many as a stronger “smoking gun” than the statistics alone.

Opposition tallies and verification issues

• Opposition sites publish images of machine printouts, claiming ~80% coverage and a large opposition win (≈67% vs 30%).
• Supporters highlight QR codes and digital signatures on receipts as verifiable; skeptics note many images lack ink signatures and say methods and sampling may be biased or incomplete.
• Some analysts linked to the opposition say similar methods matched past official results within ~2 points, but they also admit current samples may over‑represent anti‑government areas.

Broader themes

• Comparisons to Russia, Iran, and past Venezuelan elections; some argue blatant fraud itself serves as a show of power.
• Side discussions on Benford’s law (mostly deemed inapplicable here), the role of international observers, electronic vs paper voting, and meta‑arguments about when statistical anomalies are evidence of fraud versus noise.