Thursday, June 11, 2009

The whole blog HAS MOVED, no more Devil posts here Except for posts abut Orchids, I have moved all of the contents of this blog to: www.devilexcrement.com www.devilsexcrement.com or devilsexcrement.wordpress.com I will no longer update here. All posts in the almost seven years of this blog can be found there!!! Thank you! 1:20:28 AM    comment []

Saturday, April 11, 2009

Redirecting domains to wordpress For the last two months I have been posting here and in my new blog using wordpress. Today, I switched www.devilsexcrement.com and www.devilexcrement.com to redirect you to the new site. In two weeks, I will go away for a while and will blog only in the other site, where in any case I blog first nowadays. So, I recommend you switch your bookmarks there now and start commenting there. It´s faster and less quirky and soon, the only real devil around. My all orchid site will remain here for reasons that are too long to explain...Thanks to all. 9:23:50 PM    comment []

Monday, August 11, 2008

Paper by Delfino and Salas on recall referendum results accepted for publication Just for the record, the paper “Analysis of the 2004 Venezuela Referendum and the Relation between the Official Results and the Signatures Requesting it on automated centers” by Gustavo Delfino and Guillermo Salas has been accepted for publication in the Journal “Statistical Science”. (You can download the last version there) I discussed this paper in this blog before and have always believed that anyone that takes the time to understand Figure 3 will never believe again that there was no hanky panky in the 2004 recall referendum. The paper concludes that the results of the vote were not accurate and that there were significant issues associated with the results of the automated centers which showed and excessive correlation with the results of the recall petition signatures. They also show that the conclusions of the Carter Center report are exactly the opposite of what is found in their paper. 10:11:26 PM    comment []

Tuesday, November 13, 2007

New website with great presentations on our electoral problems past and present Somebody sent me the link to this website devoted to the Venezuelan Electoral system. It is well done and there are over 20 presentations on the problems of our electoral system, including evidence of fraud, problems with the electoral registry and the like. A lot of the material complements or explains with voice and slides, some of the stuff found in my RR Models section. Unfortunately, it is only in Spanish. 8:29:04 PM    comment []

Tuesday, October 03, 2006

More evidence of fraud in the recall vote In four earlier posts, I presented a description of the work of Delfino and Salas and the complementary work of Medina on the evidence for fraud in the recal referendum. I wrote four posts on the subject, which you can find here, here, here and here. In the second one of those posts I discussed the parameter "k" a measure of the proportion of fraction of Si or Yes votes to recall Hugo Chavez, divided by the number of people in the same center that signed the petition to recall Hugo Chavez:       Yes(Si) Votes k= ------------------       Signatures As a function of another “normalized” parameter s       Signatures s= ------------------      Total Votes In the latest version of the paper, now in English, Delfino and Salas have added a compelling graph of k seen here: Fig. 1. k as a function of the total number of votes on equal scales at each center for manual (left) and automated (right) centers. (Open circles are centers abroad) What this plot does is to show k as a function of the number of total votes for voting centers of equal sizes, so that no distortions are introduced by the absolute number of voters. What can be seen is that the manual centers show a lot of fluctuations or scatterat smaller centers, which is what you expect. as the number of voters becomes small. This is because k in some sense measures how good a predictor the signatures were of the actual Si vote to recall Chavez, but as centers become smaller, the accuracy will diminish because the statitistics are "worse" since the number of voters is smaller. That is why you see scatter for small number of votes on the manual centers. The problem is, that since the size of these centers are the same, one should see the same whether the centers are automated or not. But this simply does not happen as seen on the plot on the right for automated centers. In fact, for smaller centers the automated case curiousl seems to show even less fluctuations, which is absolutely counterintuitive. This is further evidence that the automated vote was manipulated at the recall referendum. Some people have argued that the problem is that manual centers tend to occurr in more rural or sparsely populated areas, so that the data above simply reflect  socioeconomic or socio cultural differences between the manual and automated centers. What Delfino and Salas did the, is to select centers which are classified by the CNE as "Mixed Townships" and "hamlets" and plot the data for these two specifica cases separately. This is shown below in Fig. 2: Fig. 2. k as a function of s (defined above) for manual centers (left) and automated centers (right) in "Mixed Townships" (top) and "hamlets" (bottom) As can be seen, the "strange" absence of scatter or fluctuations, still occurs in the automated centers when these two types of population centers are considered, while the manual centers in both cases show the expected scatter or fluctuations. This is once again evidence that the automated results were somehow manipulated and the data from the recall petition was somehow used mathematically to generate the results, rather than the actual vote. If you are not mathematically inclined, Delfino and Salas have posted a presentation called "The ABC of the Referendum" (In Spanish, soon in English), where they try to make it simple to understand. You can think of this as k being how good a predictor of the vote in the recall was. If in the automated center k is of the order of one, this means there were as many votes to recall as signatures in the petition to have the recall take place. As k increases, it means there were more and more votes than you would have thought just from the signatures. Below is a Google maps image taken from the Delfno and Salas presentation. It represents a Parish of the municipality of Valencia, thus, nearby centers are similar in socioeconomic profile. But as you can see, while the automated centers (blue) have k near 1, the manual centers (green) have k's as large as 4.3 in one case, despite the fact that that particular center is very close to automated centers where k barely moved above 1.This makes abslutely no sense unless the data was faked. Could it be clearer than that? 7:21:22 PM    comment []

Thursday, September 14, 2006

Princeton group hacks Diebold voting machine Abstract from the Center for Information Technology Policy at Princeton University on breaking the security of a Diebold voting machine, should we make a collection and send them a Smartmatic machine? You can watch the video showing the hacking:. Who was it that said Venezuela had the safest voting system in the world? Ignorance is bliss indeed! Security Analysis of the Diebold AccuVote-TS Voting Machine Ariel J. Feldman, J. Alex Halderman, and Edward W. Felten Abstract   This paper presents a fully independent security study of a Diebold AccuVote-TS voting machine, including its hardware and software. We obtained the machine from a private party. Analysis of the machine, in light of real election procedures, shows that it is vulnerable to extremely serious attacks. For example, an attacker who gets physical access to a machine or its removable memory card for as little as one minute could install malicious code; malicious code on a machine could steal votes undetectably, modifying all records, logs, and counters to be consistent with the fraudulent vote count it creates. An attacker could also create malicious code that spreads automatically and silently from machine to machine during normal election activities — a voting-machine virus. We have constructed working demonstrations of these attacks in our lab. Mitigating these threats will require changes to the voting machine's hardware and software and the adoption of more rigorous election procedures. 5:37:09 PM    comment []

Thursday, July 27, 2006

Benford's Law and the Florida and Mexican elections While it does not deal with Venezuela, maybe some readers would be interested in a paper on Benford’s Law and elections written by Prof. Mebane of the Department of Government at Cornell University. The paper looks at Benford’s law in the context of elections and the detection of fraud. It looks at the effects of manipulations of data on the results and shows that various simulated manipulations can have a strong impact on the expected results from Benford’s Law. The author then looks at data from the 2004 Florida election and the recent Mexican election. He concludes that the second digit Benford test worked well in Dade, Broward and Pascon counties, although there were some exceptions where questionable results were obtained. In contrast, the results from the Mexican election imply that there are problems in many Mexican states with the results although not in most of them. Prof. Mebane suggests that a manual recount of the vote would clarify these discrepancies. And based on a recount with sampling, one could decide whether to carry out or not a complete recount. By the way, the Mexican election shows a lot of cynicism on the part of both the Venezuelan Government and the opposition. The Venezuelan Government because while suggesting that they thought there had been fraud in the election, they never came out and said that there should be a recount. This would be exactly the opposite of their position in local elections. The opposition, because their apparent sympathy towards Calderon or antipathy towards Lopez Obrador, stopped them from calling for a full recount in Mexico, which would have been completely consistent with their positions on the Venezuelan elections. Shame on both groups! 8:02:28 PM    comment []

Tuesday, July 11, 2006

Mexican scientists fast at work on analizing electoral results Hats off to Mexican scientists that in just a week are producing data and short papers and posts on the analysis of the elections in Mexico. If Venezuelan scientists had responded with similar speed and flexibility maybe some part of history may have been changed with the 2004 RR. Maybe the precedent helped! The paper on Benford’s law by Mansilla finds some discrepancies with the 8th. and 9th. digit, which may be statistically significant, but nothing like those found in the No vote for the RR, it will be interesting to see in the future further detailed statistical analysis like what was done in Venezuela and what it may tell us. There is also a long analysis and discussion by Mochan on the evolution of the reported vote on the night of the election and the recount. Lots of data and comments, but I have not digested it sufficiently to understand even the graphs he is showing, but it looks quite interesting. I guess those Governments that want to cheat in future elections in LA are going to have to hire scientists so that whatever they do to change the outcome matches all of these tests for the adequacy of their fudged results. Maybe one day UNEFA will honor them? I find the whole thing very cool! 6:08:36 PM    comment []

Tuesday, May 23, 2006

On Mathematical Models of the recall Referendum and Fraud: Delfino, Salas and Medina part IV: The curious statistics of the audit that never was This series of four posts on Delfino, Salas and Medina is dedicated to the upcoming visitor from the Carter Center, hoping someone there will read it and will try to get an honest academic opinion on them. I will close my posting on the work of Delfino, Salas and Medina by showing how curious the results of the failed audit of the night of the referendum were. This is probably the least impacting of the four, but it certainly gives you food for thought. The CNE had promised the country to audit 1% of the voting machines or 196 of them. Unfortunately only 26 of them were audited on the fateful night of the RR. Curiously, the Si (Yes) vote obtained 63.47% in these 26 machines, compared to the 40.9% that it obtained nationwide. What Delfino and Salas did was to order the centers that were supposed to be audited according to the fraction of signatures to voters at each center f=Signatures/Voters as shown in Fig. 1, from low f to high f. The sample of centers generated by the CNE had an average value of f=0.37, that is 37% of the registered voters in these 196 centers had signed to have the recall vote against Hugo Chavez. In contrast, the average f for those centers that were eventually audited that evening was a much higher f=0.54 or 54% of the voters in those centers had signed to have a recall vote, as can be easily seen in the plot below of all of the centers and where those that were effectively audited that night fell on the curve. Fig. 1 Plot of the value of f at each of the centers that were supposed to be audited on the night of the recall vote, ordered from low f to high f. The crosses indicate the 26 centers that were effectively audited. (The cross point with the low f around 0.17 that was audited curiously corresponds to the military hospital in Caracas) Now, one can ask a very simple question: What was the probability that you would choose the 26 centers with an average value of f above 0.54 or f>0.54. What Medina did was to calculate it theoretically and then to also simulate it numerically and the probability comes out to an extremely small 3x 10-8 as shown below in the probability curve for getting each value above a certain f: Fig. 2 Probability plot of the value of f being above a certain value when you chose 26 centers at random from the 196 centers that were chosen on the night of the recall referendum to be audited. 1x 10-8 is extremely unlikely…as so many things related to the recall vote. What is intriguing is that centers with high f concentrate only a small fraction of all the voters as can be seen in the following figure, where you can see that the largest number of voters is concentrated around f=0.3, precisely where audits were not performed. Fig. 3 Distribution of the number of votes as a function of the value of f for all automatic and manual centers, showing where the largets concentarion of votes was.. Curious, no? 7:34:20 PM    comment []

Saturday, May 20, 2006

On Mathematical Models of the recall vote and fraud: Delfino, Salas and Medina: part III: The test of asymmetries In contrast with parts I and II of this series, this part requires some knowledge of statistics. I will try to explain things as much as possible, but it does require a little knowledge. Sorry! Based on the Delfino and Salas hypothesis, Medina asked himself: Is there anything in the pro-Chavez versus anti-Chavez votes from each election or the recall vote that can reveal that if there is any difference between them? The answer is yes, you can look at the symmetry of the distributions and they will tell you whether there is one ir two random variables. Suppose you have to variables, let’s say the 1998 anti-Chavez vote and the 2000 anti-Chavez vote at each voting center. You plot one versus the other such as the automated 2000 anti-Chavez vote versus the 1998 automated anti-Chavez vote, you get a plot that looks like this: Fig. 1 Plot of anti-Chavez votes in 2000 versus anti-Chavez votes in 1998 at automated centers. You now will measure what is called the vertical and transversal deviations of a graph like this. Let me explain this a little better: For the graph above you would have an “expected value” which comes from doing a least squares fit to the line y=ax that best fits the data. Now, for each point in the voting data you measure the “vertical” deviation, that is how far is the point vertically from the “expected” or mean line y=ax and the “transverse” deviation, that is how far is each point from the mean line in the direction perpendicular to the line. (See Figure 3) You now plot these two deviations in a histogram, where as you go away from deviation “zero” you will have fewer points in both the positive and negative directions. For the graph above from the anti-Chavez in the automated centers in 2000 and 1998 you get something that looks like this: Fig. 2 Distriburion of transverse deviations for the automated votes of the RR Now, the interesting thing is that there is a mathematical test to determine whether the two variables are random or not. If the two variables were random, which is what you expect from two consecutive elections at the same automated centers, then you get schematically, asymmetric distribution from the fertical deviations and an assymetric one from the transverse deviations. Fig3. Only one variable is random. The other depends on it. But, if one only one of the variables is random, i.e. in our case, if the two elections are not “independent” of each other but one set of results was obtained from each other then you expect the opposite, an assymetric distribution from the vertical deviatiosn and a symmetrical one form the transverse: Fig4. Both variables are random Well what Medina did was to plot this distributions for the RR versus the signatures and also the manual and automated centers and what he finds is that EXCEPT for the case of the data from the automated centers of the RR versus the signatures, everything else follows what you expect from two random variables. That is, in all cases but the RR, the vertical deviations show a positive asymmetry, while the transverse deviations are symmetrical. This suggests that both variables were independently random. In contrast, the data for he automated centers of the recall vote versus the signatures shows the opposite, the vertical deviations are symmetrical, while the transverse ones are asymmetrical. Now, for those of you that are not too mathematical inclined, this means that there is a mathematical test that shows exactly the positive behavior between the two cases. In fact, Medina performed three mathematical calculations that showed that in the following cases there was only single random variable: --The total number of votes versus voters in the RR --The total number of signatures versus voters in the RR --The total number of automated votes versus the signatures in the R While he performed four others that showed in othere cases there were two independent variables: --Total votes at the RR versus signatures. --Manual votes un 2000 versus manual votes in 1998R --Automated votes 2000 versus 1998 --Manual Votes RR versus signatures. Mathematically, there is no other conclusion that the SI votes at the automated centers of the RR were obtained from the number of people who signed the petition to recall Chavez using some form of equation with a distribution How about that! 9:40:08 PM    comment []