Numbers don’t have to lie – not when so many people don’t understand how they work.
Even when they tell the truth some are just too hopeless at simple mathematics to be able to see it.
Consider the following:
A little examination of the recent Russian Presidential Election results:
109,012,315 – number of registered voters for 2018 Russian election.
67.54% – proportion of registered electors who had votes counted. *
76.69% – proportion of the counted votes for Vladimir Putin. (Declared as Winner)
11.77% – proportion of votes for closest rival to Putin – the Communist Party candidate!!!
Apparently Vladdy doesn’t run for the Communist Party – he runs for the All-Russia People’s Front (SPLITTERS!), which he founded, as Prime Minister of Russia, back in 2011.
Now as for numbers not lying – from the above it can be shown that the following two statements are both true:
Vladimir Putin won the Election with a massive 76.69% (>3/4) of the vote.
48.2% of all registered voters did NOT vote for Vladimir Putin. (Just a little less than half!)
Either way he’s still vastly more popular with voters than is Donald J Trump.
* There is a high likelihood that this is NOT the same thing as the number of registered electors who actually voted – there are numerous videos showing voters posting more than one election ballot in the same box. Whether this is legal in Russia or whether it can be proven that the votes so entered were as the voters they were supposed to represent own wishes, is a matter of debate.
P.S. At the time of first thinking of this post the numbers reported were ‘unnofficially’ 72% for Putin and 60% of voters voting which gave the result of 43.2% voted for the ‘winner’ and 56.8% not voting for him. I would imagine Putin voters would be unlikely to not vote compared to those who would rather not have him in power for another 6 years thus making the massive victory seem a lot less than it actually may be.
But compared to the pathetic levels of electorate support in most Western democracies the figures are somewhat impressive. 😉
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BLob's Blog 
Numbers used to add up. Now, they don’t. They exceed 100% most of the time and internally, the percentages don’t actually make sense. Maybe it’s me, but that doesn’t make sense.
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Which numbers are we talking here, Spike? 🙂
Numbers will always add up – as long as the numbers all have the same relationship to a given thing.
It’s the old Apples and Oranges thing but with the smoke and mirrors of using numbers (especially percentages that only 2.33% of the population really can understand!) 😉 that we think relate to the same thing when they don’t. The number 2 is the same number whether we use it for counting apples or oranges but 2 apples don’t equal 2 oranges.
76% of counted voters is not 76% of the voting electorate is not 76% of the total population, etc.
Also, above i did not show all votes counted, just those for the top 2 of the 5 candidates who ran. 🙂
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