After Venezuela’s contested presidential vote, experts say government results are a ‘statistical improbability’

(CNN) — For over a week, Venezuela has been in suspense after a hotly contested presidential election left both the opposition and incumbent President Nicolas Maduro claiming victory.

At CNN’s request, several experts analyzed the results offered by both the government-aligned National Electoral Council of Venezuela (CNE) and the opposition platform Comando Con Venezuela. The experts conclude that the numbers that appear to portray Maduro as the winner are statistically improbable. Data released by the team of opposition presidential candidate Edmundo González Urrutia match “mathematically and statistically,” the experts say.

How verifiable is the data presented by each of the parties? Although Venezuela’s electoral and judicial authorities announced the victory of Nicolás Maduro, they have not shown detailed results and electoral records to support it.

In contrast, the opposition published on a website the count of 83.50% of the voting records, a result that has also been verified by civil organizations and independent media outlets.

Here is the breakdown:

What the CNE says

Early in the morning of Monday, July 29, the president of the CNE, Elvis Amoroso, proclaimed Nicolás Maduro the winner of the race. According to the data of that organization, with 80% of the records counted, the president had obtained 51.20%, that is, exactly 5,150,092 votes. In that same first bulletin, the CNE gave second place to Edmundo González with 44.2%, exactly 4,445,978 votes.

According to CNE, the sum of the votes of all the other presidential candidates represented “462,704 of the votes, equivalent to 4.06%.”

But that is a highly unlikely breakdown, experts say. “There is about a 1 in 100 million chance that this particular pattern will occur by chance,” said Andrew Gelman, a professor of Statistics and Political Science at Columbia University, in a post analyzing the numbers collected from the CNE’s first report.

Gelman ran a mathematical simulation with a probability model and concluded: “A million simulations and not once does this rounding work.”

David Arroyo Fernández, a university professor, certified economist and statistician from the College of Economists of Madrid, reached the same conclusion when consulted by CNN. After a mathematical analysis, Arroyo says: “Such a low probability —that the figures had a single decimal— ‘advises’ assuming partiality or bias in the results.”

For John Magdaleno, political scientist and director of the public affairs consultancy Polity, the inconsistencies appear in what the CNE has presented — it has not yet published the electoral results of every polling station, as mandated by Venezuelan law — as well as in the figures.

Magdaleno highlighted four technical issues in the first CNE bulletin: First, the absolute and relative number of null votes was not announced; second, the votes of all presidential candidates other than González Urrutia and Maduro were totaled “instead of presenting them separately, as is usual”; and third, the frequencies were presented with a single decimal, “which is not common.” Fourth, with 80% of the votes counted, the agency declared an irreversible trend favor of Maduro, although the reported difference was just over 704,000 votes and at least 2,300,000 votes remained to be counted.

On Friday, August 2, the CNE published a second bulletin that stated that, after processing 96.87% of the votes, Maduro had obtained 51.95% of the votes while González Urrutia reached 43.18%. They also did not make public the data that supports this bulletin.

“The data published by the CNE is not auditable because it is general data on participation and candidates, but not the disaggregated data or the database to understand how it arrived at the calculation,” Eugenio Martínez, director of the Votoscopio portal, told CNN. In addition, “the first bulletin is rounded to the first decimal, that is arithmetically impossible to happen,” he said.

John Magdaleno pointed out that since the second bulletin announced a total of 12,335,884 valid votes, “it follows that in the first bulletin there were more than 2,300,000 votes left to be counted.” This, according to Magdaleno, confirms “the central inconsistency of the first bulletin”: there was not an irreversible trend.

The opposition numbers

On Friday, August 2, the opposition released a database that it has been updating.

As of Wednesday, August 7, when this article was written, the database contained 83.50% of the tally sheets (25,073) from a total of 30,026 polling stations. According to this data, Edmundo González would have won the election with 7,303,480 votes (67%), while Maduro would have come in second with 3,316,142 votes (30%) and the other candidates only obtained 267,640 votes (2%).

“If the database is downloaded, an analysis can be made of how they arrive at the global voting announcement that they make and that is why the opposition’s data is verifiable and that of the CNE is not,” said Martínez.

In effect, the data from the opposition website can be downloaded, and it contains the disaggregated voting data with links that direct to images of the scanned minutes.

To verify that an electoral record is valid, it must have a QR code, the votes broken down by candidate and the signatures of the representatives of the parties, a representative of the electoral body and another of the electoral witnesses who participated by lottery.

Professor David Arroyo Fernández, from the College of Economists of Madrid, made a statistical study of the data published by the opposition and concludes that “it is very unlikely” that they would have had enough time “to have created a distribution of votes with these characteristics in just a few days” if they were not the real data, so “mathematically and statistically the data [of the opposition] fit in terms of numbers and the accuracy shown.”

Analyst John Madgaleno points out that “the opposition has presented more detailed and verifiable information on the result of the presidential election than the body in charge of the administration of the electoral event.”

On Monday, August 5, the Public Ministry of Venezuela opened a criminal investigation against the candidate González Urrutia and opposition leader María Corina Machado for “the alleged commission of the crimes of usurpation of functions, dissemination of false information to cause anxiety, instigation to disobedience of the laws, instigation to insurrection, criminal association and conspiracy.”

The agency claimed that the accusation is linked to the call that opposition leaders made in a statement to the military and police to stand “on the side of the people.” But it also accuses them of “falsely announcing a winner of the presidential elections other than the one proclaimed by the National Electoral Council.”

Several media and international organizations analyzed the database offered by the Venezuelan opposition. One of them was the Colombian Electoral Observation Mission (MOE).

According to this organization, “the calculation of the electoral participation that is in the database is consistent with the data presented by the Venezuelan CNE.” After analyzing the information contained in the database, the MOE validates the results that give González Urrutia as the winner.

The Associated Press (AP) processed nearly 24,000 images of ballot papers released by the opposition, representing the results from 79% of the voting machines. Each coded sheet of votes counts in QR codes, which AP decoded and analyzed programmatically, resulting in tabulations of 10.26 million votes.

According to those calculations, opposition candidate Edmundo González received 6.89 million votes and Maduro obtained 3.13 million.

The same conclusion was reached by media outlets such as The Washington Post, The New York Times and El País, which made their own analyses of the data released by Venezuela’s majority opposition and concluded that the information supports González Urrutia’s victory over Maduro.

How did the opposition obtain these records?

Thousands of volunteers participated in the electoral process on July 28. The instruction, which Maria Corina Machado herself reiterated that Sunday after the polls closed, was to stay at the voting centers until they obtained a copy of the printed records. These were then transferred to a safe place, accompanied by members of the opposition party who sought to guarantee the safety of the witnesses.

What about the percentage of the records that the opposition could not access? Could they change the result? Even if 100% of the votes contained in the missing records were favorable to Maduro, the count, according to the data published by the opposition, would likely still give González Urrutia the victory.

Marina Lacalle, a professor of the Master’s in International Relations at the School of Government of the Universidad Austral, agrees. “Taking into account that the presidential election in Venezuela is resolved by relative majority, it is very difficult to reverse a trend of almost 70% of the votes,” she told CNN.

“On the other hand, it would be necessary to see from which geographic areas (and with what sociodemographic characteristics) the missing votes are visible and counted. As can be seen from the data provided by the published votes, Maduro would have obtained more votes in those sectors that are more vulnerable in socioeconomic terms, as has been the case in past elections,” added Lacalle.

What will happen now?

The Supreme Court of Justice, the body that answers the ruling party, had given the CNE three days to present the votes. The deadline was met on Monday and according to the judicial body, the CNE delivered what was requested and began an expert process that includes summons for the 10 presidential candidates, including Maduro and González Urrutia. On Wednesday, González Urrutia announced on his social networks that he would not attend because he would be “in a situation of absolute defenselessness.”

Read the original story in Spanish here.

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