This doesn't reconcile with the official numbers regardless of how you massage them.
But isn't that really only the case when you're trying to use statistical inference to generalize from a sample? It seems like the right way to think about this poll is as a direct measurement of a floor of support for the challenger (others have said that is >2x the her official vote count), and the right statistical question is to ask is what's the probability that the official results are true given that floor.
We can't exclude the possibility that If I were a foreign power with a military budget measured in trillions then the telegram poll would say exactly what I wanted it to say.
That's true for "reasonable" poll sizes. As your poll size increases past a certain point, it does begin to guarantee correctness.
An election is a poll with the size of all eligible voters.
"Official" election results were giving Tsikhanoyskaya around half a million votes while over 1 million Telegram users with Belarusian phone numbers already said that they voted for her.
Se here https://t.me/telegrambelarus/9
> An election is a poll with the size of all eligible voters.
I think you're oversimplifying the situation. Clearly, sample size alone doesn't have that much of a correctness guarantee, or according to your own statement, we'd be able to trust the official results.
People are not complaining because the election is a biased sample of the population (not possible because by definition an election is open to all eligible voters).
People are complaining because they believe the government is not truthfully reporting the actual election results.
Good polling technique cannot mitigate fraud.
If there is an issue with the underlying polling technique, making the sample larger does not guarantee more correctness. You simply end up with a larger set of bad data.
2. This sample in the Telegram poll is ~20% the number of voters in Belarus.
The poll itself says 59% of the 2.3m respondents were people who voted in the election.
That's 1.4m people, which is 15% of their population and 21% of their eligible voting population.
But that’s not what I was taking issue with. Above, I was disputing the claim that a large sample size “guarantees correctness”
Likely, neither this Telegram poll nor the election are statistically sound in their results, for different reasons.
I am not saying that the Telegram poll has to be statistically sound to be valuable evidence.
Also what about all the babushkas who most likely voted for Lukashenko but don't have a smartphone?
This is not to say that more people didn't vote for the opposition than the official numbers state. But Lukashenko still could have won.
There are many ways that could happen. But it's pretty good evidence to add to the context, and the pile of evidence was already quite big.
Nonetheless, I don't doubt the validity of these particular results, because I think we have enough corroborating evidence. We don't have to justify the rigorousness of a Telegram poll to come to that same conclusion.
For instance people in the US still use text-messaging to a significant percentage. That's hard for me to believe as well.
It's no use looking at Telegram's world usage, that's for sure.
Telegram users are not going to pass any "Randomness" scrutiny. For all we know, Telegram User A asks Telegram User B to take the poll, etc. That's not random, and can introduce all sorts of statistical bias.
While I don't believe in Belarus official results, that Telegram evidence is not a real evidence. It's just a hint.
Otherwise you can only draw your error bars equally in both ways at once, and then they need to be pretty large before the numbers stop saying what they clearly are saying.
If a poll shows 80% for candidate A, you’d only need to hit 62.5% of the population to guarantee that candidate A would hit 50% of the vote even if the remaining 47.5% voted for other candidates.
Not really though.
An election is ostensibly 'perfect sample of the electorate' (assuming everyone voted), which is what makes it 'good'.
It's very easy to get a 'very large sample size' that is still 'very inaccurate'.
In this case, we're talking about potential numbers larger than literal voters, which makes it interesting - but the sample size again is not the issues if we're looking at a 'poll'.
With the census.
... but doesn't really matter how big the poll sample was if the sample was not representative - the results don't have a lot of meaning.
And it's pretty fair to say it was not representative.
In fact, you don't even need remotely that size of a sample if the sample is representative.
Polling is not about sample size, it's about the quality of the sample.
According to the telegram poll, 1.184 million people voted for Tikhanovskaya. That's over 5x as many as according to the official numbers.
The sample size doesn't matter here, were talking absolute number. It seems pretty unlikely 5x more people (absolute number, not fraction) voted for her in a poll than in the real elections.
(I have not checked the source for the numbers, I've just assumed the above poster used the right ones)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_Belarusian_presidential_e...
Bear in mind that Wikipedia's policy is use "official" sources when in doubt. According to Wikipedia, Assange is a criminal. Snowden is a traitor.
Not really.
They use credible sources as far as they can find them, their numbers on Belarus look like what the international press is reporting.
Wikipedia doesn't 'think' that Assange or Snowden are anything. They have long articles detailing their history, and possibly what some others might think.
Did all the eligible voters who phone-polled actually vote?
Did they poll the way they actually voted?
Some people don't have two phones?
Can we trust that telegram doesn't have a flaw in the means by which it is measured? (i.e. register again with the same SIM, or something like that?)
It's nice that there is a phone number as validation, but this doesn't 'prove' anything.
Edit: I should add, apparently people are registering photos of their votes, which don't jibe with the tally, which is probably a much better indication of problems with voting [1]
Whom exactly benefits from that? It would have to be a nation-state, and they weren't exactly doing much about the situation before the "election".
What is more likely: that the existing dictator and his supporters made defrauded the election to keep power or that some unknown entity defrauded an Telegram poll for not much gain.
Unless Telegram poll's system was completely broken, but you'd expect other large polls to already have revealed that.
Propaganda and narrative is the whole name of the game here.
It's Telegram poll, there are any number of ways it could be messed up, including very easily someone sympathetic at Telegram (though I doubt this), it has no material credibility.
It's a data point, not 'proof'.
Its possible that some of the people in the Telegram poll are not eligible to vote (due to age or whatever).
There could be other issues like people changing who they voted for in the election after previously voting in Telegram.
People behind this campaign are starting to reveal their names at last. I know personally one of them.
My network says others are highly respectable as well.
From what I've seen of reporting in Belarus, nobody watched over the shoulder as people filled in their ballots. It's still a secret who any specific individual voted for (unless they choose to tell you).
They have a massive audience but Ron Paul and Bernie still weren't anywhere near the presidency.
It's not quite a Telegram problem, voters in a protest poll are not an unbiased sample. This is why elections where one side denies the legitimacy of an election "invalid," in the "we all accept the results" sense.
Call it it petition, protest or public declaration. In that regard,the numbers are meaningful.