Narrativë

“A sudden swing in the live results feed shows votes being changed in real time”

Live result displays are provisional, are not the legal count, and break in visible ways. Fiji’s 2022 results app showed an abrupt change in its provisional trend that was read as a vote swing; the multinational observer group found it was a corrected display error and gave no evidence that officials re-tabulated anything. In the Philippines the near-constant ratio between the two leading candidates was offered as proof of a preprogrammed result, when a ratio between two candidates stabilises quickly once many precincts report — an arithmetic property of averaging. Screenshots of a provisional feed are among the most shareable and least probative election evidence there is.