<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" standalone="yes"?><oembed><version><![CDATA[1.0]]></version><provider_name><![CDATA[The Dish]]></provider_name><provider_url><![CDATA[http://dish.andrewsullivan.com]]></provider_url><author_name><![CDATA[Andrew Sullivan]]></author_name><author_url><![CDATA[https://dish.andrewsullivan.com/author/sullydish/]]></author_url><title><![CDATA[About That 88.7%&nbsp;&#8230;]]></title><type><![CDATA[link]]></type><html><![CDATA[<p>Andrew Gelman <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/monkey-cage/wp/2014/06/11/why-its-pretty-obvious-the-syria-vote-totals-are-fabricated/" target="_blank">passes along</a> a good catch from Anatoly Vorobey, who shows that Syria’s election results were fraudulent:<!--tpmore --></p>
<blockquote><p>They are too accurate. There’s 11,634,412 valid ballots, and Assad won with 10,319,723 votes at 88.7%. That’s not 88.7%, that’s 88.699996%. Or in other words, that’s 88.7% of 11,634,412, which is 10,319,723.444, rounded to a whole person. All the other percentages in the results are the same way, so given the magnitude of the numbers, it’s evident someone took the total number, used a calculator and rounded. This was first <a href="https://www.facebook.com/roman.tumaykin/posts/713056328753588" target="_blank">noticed</a>, to my knowledge, by a Russian blogger Roman Tumaykin. The reason he looked at the vote counts in the first place was that a few weeks ago there was an identical case with a sham referendum in a Ukrainian province of Lugansk, controlled by separatists. The vote counts there were also all “correct” up to a rounding to a person.</p></blockquote>
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