According to the official numbers, of the 7.8 million eligible voters, 40% voted, and 7% of those voted for Tikhanovskaya. That's 218400 people.
According to the telegram poll, 1.184 million people voted for Tikhanovskaya. That's over 5x as many as according to the official numbers.
The sample size doesn't matter here, were talking absolute number. It seems pretty unlikely 5x more people (absolute number, not fraction) voted for her in a poll than in the real elections.
(I have not checked the source for the numbers, I've just assumed the above poster used the right ones)
The turnout was high indeed. As for the rest of the Wikipedia article, it is woefully incorrect. I will add up-to-date information to the "Voice" section and I hope others will fix factual errors in the Death section and other parts of that article.
Bear in mind that Wikipedia's policy is use "official" sources when in doubt. According to Wikipedia, Assange is a criminal. Snowden is a traitor.
"Bear in mind that Wikipedia's policy is use "official" sources when in doubt. According to Wikipedia, Assange is a criminal. Snowden is a traitor."
Not really.
They use credible sources as far as they can find them, their numbers on Belarus look like what the international press is reporting.
Wikipedia doesn't 'think' that Assange or Snowden are anything. They have long articles detailing their history, and possibly what some others might think.
Even in the worst case scenario, where each and every opposition voter took part in the poll, and literally everyone else voted for Lukashenko, this still prpves that the true result was at least 17% for opposition, which is more than the official results claim.
Did all the eligible voters who phone-polled actually vote?
Did they poll the way they actually voted?
Some people don't have two phones?
Can we trust that telegram doesn't have a flaw in the means by which it is measured? (i.e. register again with the same SIM, or something like that?)
It's nice that there is a phone number as validation, but this doesn't 'prove' anything.
Edit: I should add, apparently people are registering photos of their votes, which don't jibe with the tally, which is probably a much better indication of problems with voting [1]
With these numbers, there would need to be significant effort to fraud the Telegram poll. For no real benefit other than maybe propaganda.
Whom exactly benefits from that? It would have to be a nation-state, and they weren't exactly doing much about the situation before the "election".
What is more likely: that the existing dictator and his supporters made defrauded the election to keep power or that some unknown entity defrauded an Telegram poll for not much gain.
Unless Telegram poll's system was completely broken, but you'd expect other large polls to already have revealed that.
"For no real benefit other than maybe propaganda."
Propaganda and narrative is the whole name of the game here.
It's Telegram poll, there are any number of ways it could be messed up, including very easily someone sympathetic at Telegram (though I doubt this), it has no material credibility.
I can't tell if you are arguing that the original vote was less likely to be skewed than this one, or just that this one doesn't pass the highest bar that could be set for it.
I'm arguing it's an 'online poll' and subject to all sorts of possible issues. It's probably a decent indication of what seems to be some otherwise obvious fraud at the polls, it's just not 'proof' of anything really.
... but doesn't really matter how big the poll sample was if the sample was not representative - the results don't have a lot of meaning.
And it's pretty fair to say it was not representative.
In fact, you don't even need remotely that size of a sample if the sample is representative.
Polling is not about sample size, it's about the quality of the sample.