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Comment by cptaj | Hacker News Reader

>Every election would have to be fake. Every government database would have to be full of fake names. And all for what? To get one over on the dumb Westerners?

While I agree that the claim that world population is under 1 billion is bonkers, I also think he grossly underestimates how frequent and large the fraud is.

Take Venezuela for example, the UN and several NGO's have confirmed a diaspora caused by chavismo of well over 7 million people. This is not recognized by the venezuelan government and is not reflected in any of the stats pages you can find.

That's a 20-30% difference in the real vs reported population of the country.

And yes. They do fake the elections.

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>world population is under 1 billion is bonkers,

Yea, that would leave the US and Japan with about half the world population assuming our counts are even close to correct.

> assuming our counts are even close to correct.

That's a bold assumption. States get more representatives if they inflate the population count: https://www.census.gov/topics/public-sector/congressional-ap...

States aren't the ones doing the counting, though, the US Census Bureau is

Given that Texas forgot to take advantage of this during the last election, it would seem the incentives are pretty negligible.

> Take Venezuela for example, the UN and several NGO's have confirmed a diaspora caused by chavismo of well over 7 million people.

Huh? Chavismo began in 1999. So if you're claiming that chavismo caused a lot of migration, you'd need to come up with data that correlates with that time period.

The reality is, the big migrations from Venezuela began in 2017, which correlates with the very harsh economic sanctions imposed by the U.S. on Venezuela, which caused a hyper-inflation that lasted too long.

It has nothing to do with Chavismo and everything to do with American economic terrorism.

Not according to wikipedia :

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venezuelan_refugee_crisis

In 1998, when Chávez was first elected, the number of Venezuelans granted asylum in the United States increased between 1998 and 1999.[30] Chávez's promise to allocate more funds to the impoverished caused concern among wealthy and middle-class Venezuelans, triggering the first wave of emigrants fleeing the Bolivarian government.[31]

Additional waves of emigration occurred following the 2002 Venezuelan coup d'état attempt[32] and after Chávez's re-election in 2006.[32][33] In 2009, it was estimated that more than one million Venezuelans had emigrated in the ten years since Hugo Chávez became president.[2] According to the Central University of Venezuela (UCV), an estimated 1.5 million Venezuelans (four to six percent of the country's total population) emigrated between 1999 and 2014.[15]

The Venezuelan refugee crisis has a lot to do with Chavismo.

The graph just after the paragraph you quoted contradicts it :)

It says the number of Venezuelans living abroad was 700,000 in 2015, and it skyrocketed from that point onward.

What happened around that time? - December 2014: Obama signed the first set of unilateral US sanctions on Venezuela - March 2015: Obama issued an executive order classifying Venezuela as an "unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security of the United States"

Sure, there may have been slow migration before the sanctions, but it could have been explained by a multitude of reasons, not necessarily Chavismo. For example, the frequent U.S.-backed riots and coups are surely a factor that encourages migration. People value security and stability.

another poster accusing US of terrorism and exhonerating a murdering dictator

truly HN approved content

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