June 10, 2025
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The 2024 Venezuelan elections were the most important elections in the modern history of Venezuela. The opposition united behind the presidential candidate Edmundo Gonzalez, and the polls showed the overwhelming popularity of the candidate against the incumbent president, Nicolás Maduro.
A project team was set up to provide information on the real results of the election. The quick count project aimed to provide the real results of the elections to stakeholders immediately.
This was achieved through a combination of different elements, namely:
1) a statistical sampling method
2) a chatbot developed for WhatsApp to collect results from the selected polling stations
Stateless was responsible for technological development. The chatbot was primarily developed for WhatsApp, with contingency support for Facebook Messenger and Instagram.
The activists could not only upload photographic evidence to the chatbot but also report incidents. The data was immediately and automatically parsed.
A dynamic dashboard was developed to provide results with a calculated margin of error based on the statistical sampling. A web application was also created for a group of volunteers to validate and verify each data point, as well as to scrape data where the automatic parsing didn’t work.
The project was a huge success. The project team provided the real results of the election to stakeholders on election day, before the regime announced the results in a public broadcast.
This allowed the stakeholders to react quickly. A wide range of international media outlets (such as the New York Times, Financial Times, Washington Post, etc) reported the results of the project.
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