Biases are irrelevant. If you look a the numbers, there are more people saying they voted for the opposition on the Telegram pool than votes on the official pool. About 5 times as many.

What about the people under 18 who I assume could take the poll and also people who didn't go to vote but took a few seconds to take the poll on Telegram?

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.

We'll say Belarus has 1m people that are old enough to both have a smart phone and be under the legal voting age (and that's being extremely gracious). Unless you're saying literally EVERY ONE OF THEM voted in this poll AND voted for the opposition, there are STILL more people of voting age in the telegram poll who voted for the opposition than "officially" voted for the opposition. The numbers are nearly impossible to believe unless Telegram is intentionally fudging the numbers.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Belarus

This is certainly damning data, but having a telephone in Belarus does not necessarily mean that person voted in the prior election. This is good evidence, but not a mathematical proof.

The people can lie to Telegram, Telegram can lie, somebody can attack the communications, somebody can attack the telephones, somebody can impersonate the numbers, all the Telegram voters can be from those 60% that didn't vote...

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.

Exactly, this is impossible to reconcile. Either there has been vote fraud or this people didn't actually go to the poll station. Or people can vote more than once.

Telegram? 5% of the world uses Telegram. And I bet the 50+ age demographic is heavily underrepresented in that subset. Significant sample bias shows up in US polling using mediums that are exponentially more widespread.

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.

People in different parts of the world differ HUGELY in what instant-messaging communications platform they use.

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.

Maybe Telegram is popular in Belarus, but there is one thing that is true all over the world: rates of technology literacy and access is lower for the old/poor/rural.