Featured image of post please don't chase random people over shaky voter fraud data.

please don't chase random people over shaky voter fraud data.

for some reason much of my twitter feed (i still use all three) is excited about Rahul Gandhi’s claims of vote fraud. I beg to differ.

TL;DR google hanlon’s razor

Disclaimer: i don’t like politics or writing about it. what’s particularly aggrevated me here is that everyone is wrong and no one is trying to actually solve the problem presented here. evidently the ECI’s data is horrendously maintained, and RaGa is sleepwalking through a conspiracy theory to accuse officials of malice. take this as a lesson in statistics and manipulation, not an attack or praise for any given political party.

Disclaimer 2: in case someone tries to take anything here out of context, fuck you. both political parties, ECI, twitter, reddit, “progressives” or racists. fuck you. you are all embarrassing and you’re going to misremember how wrong you were about this.

Disclaimer 3: don’t take this as an argument that there is no electoral fraud that the BJP does. i’m sure there’s strategies they use for excluding voters they don’t like. my anger over the opposition’s incompetent investigation remains still justified.

i don’t know or care much about politics, but I do know data and how people lie with it.

frontmatter

here’s a voter whose name appears on two different booths. this is a proof of inadequate data deduplication. i have not shown their name, and identifying information that can matter. you could argue whether more or less redaction makes sense, but this conveys the point.

the same minimal care for citizen privacy cannot be expected of India’s opposition leader for some strange reason, who is operating on funding and training orders of magnitude higher than mine. PII redaction is serious business, and it says a lot when you choose to not care. but there’s more,

we will accept the given information, analysis, and duplicacy to be true. this still does not make for any proof of conspiracy or fraud. data errors exist, and while we cannot say with certainty it /is/ one, we also cannot say with certainty that it /isn’t/. when it comes to accusing powerless citizens, must we not err on the side on caution?

Case 1 - citizen A has in fact willingly registered twice. democracy has now been defrauded by 0.001% and is now in shambles. we still have zero proof of a conspiracy. we don’t know if they have voted twice, we don’t know if they registered twice of their own volition or if someone else forged a registration in their name. are they part of Double Voters Anonymous, a paid organisation of tens of thousands of sleeper cells? did someone else vote in their name, making hundreds of poll booth officials (who are randomly picked, often volunteers and teachers) complicit in this forgery?

if this is the hypothesis, this would warrant an investigation. however, RaGa neither asserts this hypothesis or investigates in this direction. maybe his interpretation of the facts is something else.

Case 2 - due to what could be a plethora of clerical errors (incorrect division of voters, last minute locality changes, relocation of the voter themselves, accidental double registration, etc.), the person has been registered twice. the Very Smart among us would notice that this is not a conspiracy! and again, we have not proven that the person has voted twice.

but something tells me RaGa doesn’t believe in this hypothesis either. what does he believe then?

the difference between a conspiracy theory and an investigation is that an investigation is interested in discovering factual, real events. a conspiracy theory is the act of posturing at discrepancies that don’t make sense to the untrained eye (see, UFOs), and #nooticing that something sinister might be afoot. and the people to blame are a cabal of people somehow ubiquitously complicit in this atrocity.

for our example to be true (and for RaGa’s claims that this is flowing top-down), head officials in ECI and the BJP are somehow colluding with local volunteers, somehow none of whom have reported this happening to any media channels. for all the drama about electoral rolls, RaGa says very little about /voting/ itself. the in-person countermeasures to double voting (inking, ID verification, face verification [aka looking at them]) is absent from this discussion.

although it isn’t just RaGa i have a bone to pick with. I watched his entire press conference, the journalists’ questions at the end, AltNews’s coverage on it, and some remarks by both BJP representatives and national news reporters, as well as the ECI’s own responses. the arguments i have made and am going to make were not made by any of these (to the best of my knowledge, i obviously cannot be exhaustive, corrections are welcome).

speaking of conspiracy theories, this is very clearly imitating Trump propaganda circa 2020, and the assumption of malice where data collection errors are possible only serves to marginalise the impoverished.

do you know what a “house number” implies? i don’t. many people don’t. many houses /dont have/ numbers. however, according to RaGa, >30% of the people in the Mahadevapura constitutency (after the fake “100,000” votes are deducted) have invalid addresses.

what makes an address invalid? methodology is here. an empty or dummy address is easy to filter, but what about verification? who is doing the verification? is failing verification negatively or positively judged? who is “verifying” these addresses? i will give him the benefit of doubt and assume his research team went to every address and checked if they could find a house there.

great, now what address do you write when you’re homeless? what address do you write when you have to move places every few months? what if you’ve just migrated in and haven’t found a place to stay yet? what if you live in a shelter or a creche or some similar accomodation? so you write your work address instead, and now you have committed fraud by having a lot of people voting from the same place.

this is what i mean when i say thoughtless theorising over dirty data only excludes the most marginalised in society. when you see this you ask yourself, “do we need to broaden our systems to account for people who don’t fit within these rules? how do we make it easier for people to update their address, and how do we encourage them to do so? better yet, how do we get these people into a permanent residence?” but backhandedly, Rahul calls all of these people participants in an electoral conspiracy.

but we do have proof of double voting! yes, this name was checked twice on the roll. seeing this, RaGa’s thorough investigation team does not contact the voter herself to confirm this information, or the booth officer, whose name and phone number are publicly available. notably, these are both on the same booth.

in fact, any inputs from actual election officials, booth managers (the accused booth operators, given that they were complicit in double voting as per his allegations) are absent from this investigation.

consider this counterfactual - the woman walks up to the poll booth. the officer looks for her name, and finds it twice. to prevent her from double voting, they check it in both positions. did something like this happen? i don’t know, but i would rather bet on this than a criminal conspiracy. people do workarounds to deal with dirty data all the time.

one cannot prove things without “cold, hard” data, but data by itself also says very little.

stat crimes

can you spot the stats crime here? you have ten seconds!

can you spot the stats crime here? you have ten seconds!

it’s not particularly hard. he just adds the 5 numbers together. very deliberately, he claims “vote theft happened X times”, not “X votes were stolen”. this lets him get away with his own deduplication problem (if he has done it somewhere, he did not mention it)

i’ve not spoken about the form 6 scenarios because i don’t understand the nuances of it either, and my position is strong enough without it. i’m skeptical on what his criterion for “misuse” is, but i’ve talked too long anyway. while the overlap might not be that large between these categories, they are definitely not mutually exclusive.

this is not even entering into the optics of pointing at a 70 year old woman and vaguely gesturing her to be a criminal. he does not make a full criminal accusation against anyone named in the data, even though his argument implies that they might be complicit in the crime if not the actual criminals. it is uncomfortable for him to either admit that the people involved did this willingly (because now he is just accusing civilians far less powerful than him without evidence) or unwillingly (because that begs the question of the modus operandi of such a conspiracy).

suppose i am a powerful person who can forge double addresses, and convince polling booth officials to turn a blind eye. what convinces me to put a hundred people in the same address and give them invalid photos when i can just… make up details. ostensibly no one is checking.

conspiracies rely on saying as little tractable information as possible to prevent saying anything that might be falsifiable.

round 2 of spot the stats crime. you can take more time here.

round 2 of spot the stats crime. you can take more time here.

2 crore is the number of registered voters in Haryana. around 1.1 crore of them actually voted. 22k is the combined vote number of districts with the narrowest margins by /number/, not by /percentage/.

here’s a table of districts with the narrowest margins by number. Blue last column indicates an INC victory. this sure makes his case much weaker, given that he never gave any proof of /which side/ said fake voters are voting, and he’s transferring the example from another state.

noticeably, the districts with a narrow gap by vote number don’t really have a narrow gap by percentage! these were /not/ tight elections.

that said, it is absolutely true that the popular vote here does not justify the seats margin. you could look at this and reasonably argue that First Past the Post elections suck and we should consider other modes like RCV or fair redistricting, but that does not make for a saucy conspiracy or for a person to pin blame on. so it is skipped from any mention.

this is bad enough, but last year’s Delhi elections were more egregious.

this is bad enough, but last year’s Delhi elections were more egregious.

a lot of these are lazy, charlatan lies. i wouldn’t be surprised if he got this presentation made by some Consultancy or Think Tank that told him the most effective way to lie with plausible deniability. marketing firms lie like this, and i don’t trust them with my money for a minute, let alone my government.

but he does have a solution. his solution is for the EC to give everyone digitally parseable copies of voter rolls and security camera footage. this for some reason does not make anyone worry, people on his side or against it. “i want to see you when you vote” and “i want an indexed database of every indian citizen to be publicly available” for some reason does not worry him. one has to wonder if these are the same people who signed the privacy regulations from a year ago or if they simply forgot.

who is going to review CCTV footage of millions of people voting? it’s even tougher to automate than the rolls that he counted, which took months for just a part of a constituency. but CCTV footage /will/ be reviewed for individuals. stuff like this is mostly intended as a feel-good measure that ends up inevitably used to exclude people who make us mildly uncomfortable from the system.

any reasonable person should look at names on that screen and go “oh god, it could have been me”. because it could have been you on that presentation screen. i’m sure all of your government-registered data isn’t up to date or accurate.

to clarify, I think it’s a good thing to research topics like this. as a political party, you have access to the information and power to make research like this work. data collection is hard and immensely prone to discrepancies. here’s an article that you can read if you’re not convinced of this point.

when we see a data discrepancy, we point it out and ask it to be fixed. i welcome you to improve the standards of data cleaning and collection, i welcome your funding and technical expertise put to the use of benefiting the country and election integrity. i do not welcome you instead use (what are honestly mostly going to be) false positives as a way of undermining trust in an already shaky democracy to further justify machiavellian manipulation because “it’s all a scam anyway”

miscellaneous addenda

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you had months and millions in party funding. please just get a person that can import opencv2. every week someone is scaremongering about jobs being replaced by AI, might as well use it when you’re given the chance.

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the ECI’s response to that is even more disappointing. for some reason they intend on calling it a fact check even though there are no facts in the post. rather than admitting to any fault in their data deduplication / cleaning practices, the ECI chooses to “ante up” and buy the conspiracy / no conspiracy dichotomy to prevent embarrassing themselves. the same is the case for most BJP leader responses that i found.

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a lot of lib-lefties are excited to discover proof of vote rolls being duplicates. quite a few tweets from Zubair on this, but yeah a lot of shit on my feed made me angry enough to write this. what have you accomplished with this nonsense? three people double-voted to sabotage 0.0001% of democracy? this is such a non-argument proves nothing. you don’t even know who they voted for.

i point to Zubair because he’s the one who shows up on my feed, but the incumbent party’s twitter accounts and political “debate” channels are equally embarrassing to look at. this is lifted right out of the Trump-Reagan playbook. “look at this common person, they killed our country. 0.0001% at a time. this is proof of societal evil”, and they hyperfixate on it to distract from any systemic analysis. and the oppositions bite the bait to save face.

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Shashi Tharoor is a charlatan but not stupid. he suggests tampering only as a possibility and an afterthought because he understands the absurdity of the allegations at hand. and yet.

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