#Venezuela voters got receipts. Maduro lost.
"The Post extracted and analyzed data from 23,720 of the tally sheets that were scanned and posted online by the opposition. Of those, González earned 67 percent of the vote to Maduro’s 30 percent.
Those tally sheets represent 79 percent of the voting tables used on July 28. Even if Maduro won every vote on the remaining 21 percent, assuming a similar turnout, he would still fall more than 1.5 million votes shy of González."
A lesson for #Belarus: you can achieve more when you #organize networks of people. Tech can help but it won't do the work for you.
"A group of opposition leaders, some holed up inside the Argentine Embassy in Caracas for months to evade arrest warrants, recruited and coordinated “captains” across the country. They set up 133 locations, with high-definition scanners and Starlink internet access, where volunteers gathered, digitized and uploaded the documents to an app created for the purpose."
Excellent point about needing organised networks of people, not just tech alone.
This particular election seems to be unprecedented in the sense of being similar to #reproducibility in science in terms of #OpenData and checksums + hashes. It's not a question of points of view, it's a question of either providing alternative raw data, or accepting that the result of analysing the data is unequivocal. The people part of confirming some raw data is crucial too.
Probably "unprecedented" is too strong: the citizens' "Voice" Голос/Голас initiative at the 2020 Belarusian presidential election was very much in the same spirit.
An advantage in the VE case was the independent statisicians' team with a preregistered protocol - AltaVista PVT (Parallel Vote Tabulation).
Also the csv file with a static domain for the jpegs helps with reproducibility.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_Belarusian_presidential_election#Internet_initiatives