Talk:1970 Chilean presidential election

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1970 election figures

 * ''(Conversation inserted and consolidated from two user_talk pages.)

Hello there. We both added voting numbers to Chilean coup of 1973 yesterday. Unfortunately, the two sets don't agree; the differences are pretty trivial, however. Can I ask where you got yours from? Mine came from the Political Database of the Americas at Georgetown U. Cheers, –Hajor 14:29, 12 Jun 2004 (UTC)


 * I got my numbers from http://www.pubchoicesoc.org/papers/keech.pdf. Probably the best thing to do, given the slightly different numbers, is to pick (any) one set of credible numbers in the article on the coup, source it appropriately, and have a separate article on the election itself that deals with these slight discrepancies. -- Jmabel 19:05, Jun 12, 2004 (UTC)

I'm actually a step or two ahead of you, having started 1970 Chilean presidential election earlier today. I'm inclined to come out in favour of my figs from the PDBA: the percentages there do add up to 100%; the ones in the pdf you quoted and here (sorry, I saw the note only after writing) total only 99 -- perhaps they're percentages of total votes cast, including spoilt/blank papers? (Actually, the pdf at one point gives Allende 36.3 and, at another, 36.6; he also writes "Allesandri" on p. 21.) So, standardize on the PDBA figs in the coup article, and explore discrepancies (or investigate further and reach a definitive answer) in the election article. Are you cool with that? –Hajor 19:41, 12 Jun 2004 (UTC)


 * Whatever you want to do here. I'd actually be slightly suspicious of numbers that say that the three leading canddidates had, collectively, 100% of the vote. My guess is that someone is just ignoring minor candidates, added up the three, and did calculation. The numbers that add up to more like 99% are more likely to be accurate. -- Jmabel 22:31, Jun 13, 2004 (UTC)

I don't know who to believe any more. I thought the PDBA figs would be good, but using the figures on their table, {votes per candidate} / {total votes} does not give the percentages they indicate (they give 36.23, 35.70, and 27.90 if you're interested). That has somewhat undermined my confidence in them. I've found another set here, which does give the 36.3 & 35.3 percentages most frequently cited (and the address of an academic we could perhaps e-mail for clarification, or at least a cite of his source).

Re your comment about minor candidates -- I honestly don't think there were any: it was a strict 3-way race, as far as I've ever heard. But I'd be happy to be set straight on that. The figs quoted on the Idea International page give a higher total vote: perhaps that takes care of spoilt/blank votes, and the PDBA numbers are just the valid vote. I tweaked the table on the article to indicate that assumption ("valid votes"). But it's still not terribly clear.

I'm also going to copy-and-paste both sides of this exchange to Talk:1970 Chilean presidential election, which might save someone some investigative work in the future. I assume you don't have any problem with that -- if you do, my apologies, and pse revert. Regards, –Hajor 19:38, 14 Jun 2004 (UTC)

Moved from article
Comments on other articles belong in a talk page, not in the article proper, so here they are:
 * figs previously reported in text of coup article: 36.3% / 34.9% / 27.8%


 * figs reported in Allende article: 36% to 34% & 27%

Jmabel 05:16, Jun 20, 2004 (UTC)

Events immediately after the election
The article certainly should cover (and currently does not) the events between the election and the inauguration. There were (apparently US-backed) attempts to prevent Allende from taking office, up to and including the assassination of a general who was willing to defend the constitutional result of an election. -- Jmabel 05:21, Jun 20, 2004 (UTC)


 * I've added an external link,, a pro-Allende Spanish-language source with enormous day-by-day detail on the events between the election and Allende's inauguration as president. If someone has the patience to wade through this, there is probably a lot of material that would benefit the article. On the other hand, for any statements about matters not in the public record, one would presumably want either a second, independent source, or at the very least the article should make clear that this comes from a partisan source. -- Jmabel 22:26, Jun 20, 2004 (UTC)

Added a link
I added a link to a wikisource article containing Allende's first speech to the Chilean parliament following the 1970 election (21 May 1971). Regards, Johdl 23:00, 28 Oct 2004 (UTC)

"Chile" is not an adjective
Why was this moved without discussion? "Chile presidential election" isn't even grammatical: "Chile" is not an adjective. -- Jmabel | Talk 21:09, Apr 11, 2005 (UTC)

1970 election figures again
I reverted a recent change to this section that removed a diversity of sources, replacing them with a single set of numbers published the day after the election. No national election is well-counted the day after, so those numbers were extremely unlikely to be more accurate, and certainly do not merit removing the links to a variety of sources. -- Jmabel | Talk 04:58, August 4, 2005 (UTC)

User:Napoleón333 left the following in an HTML comment in the article commenting on El Mercurio ' s numbers. I've moved them here so we have a place to discuss


 * here is the source in spanish: Los resultados de los escrutinios de la eleccion del viernes, conocidos a las 2.50 horas de ayer, dan al abanderado de la Unidad Popular, senador Salvador Allende, la primera mayoroa [sic, presumably mayoría] relativa, con una ventaja del 1,4 por ciento de la votacion y de 39.338 votos sobre el candidato independiente don Jorge Alessandri, que obtuvo un millon 36 mil 278 sufragios, o sea el 34,9 por ciento de la votacion. En un tercer lugar, muy distanciado de los dos primeros, queda el candidato de la Democracia Cristiana, don Radomiro Tomic. (¿is or not the more serius number?)

Translating the above: "The results of the scrutinies of Friday's election, known at 2:50 yesterday morning, give the standard-bearer of Popular Unity, senator Salvador Allende, the plurality [literally "first relative majority"], with an advantage of 1.4 per cent of the vote and 39,338 votes over the independent candidate don Jorge Alessandri, who obtained one million 36 thousand 278 ballots, which would be 34.9 per cent of the vote. In third place, far behind the two first, remains the candidate of the Christian Democrats, don Radomiro Tomic."

User:Napoleón333 asks whether these are "the more serious numbers". I'd say that they are all equally "serious"&mdash;all of the sources cited for the numbers in the article are excellent sources, except perhaps Kissinger, and what he wrote is of interest in and of itself, given his role in the events of the Allende era&mdash;but, as I remarked above, numbers from a day or two after an election don't generally have a better claim to accuracy. Note, in the quoted passage, "conocidos a las 2.50 horas de ayer": that is presumably a statement of when the data are from, not a claim that as of that time every vote from every remote region had been counted. (I don't know enough about Chilean election law from that time to know if there would have been absentee or overseas ballots.)

I haven't even looked closely enough to see if there is any pattern in the numbers from the different sources, other than not being exactly equal. If someone wants to make a case for a different one being primary in the article (getting into the table), I'm open to that, as long as all the different sources and their numbers remain in the article. -- Jmabel | Talk 22:48, August 5, 2005 (UTC)

And now (about a year later) it looks like the page http://eleccion.atspace.com/Presidente1970.txt that we cited is being taken down from the web, and isn't in the Internet Archive. I am placing at /source1 a copy from Google's current cache, which I'm afraid won't be there for long. - Jmabel | Talk 21:47, 2 August 2006 (UTC)


 * That site is currently at http://eleccion.atspace.com/presidente1970.htm. It has been updated with a summary of the election and includes a source. 200.124.35.207 23:09, 25 August 2006 (UTC)

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Results section
I'm about to change the discussion of the vote in congress in the results section, which previously said that almost all of Allende's supporters in congress (80 of 83) were Communist Party members which (a) doesn't make sense and (b) seems to me to be based on a misreading of the cited source, where I think it's pretty clear the figure of 80 refers to Popular Unity as a whole.

That source is a newspaper article from the time, which doesn't seem ideal, but I'm not in a position to do better at the moment. Rafaelgr (talk) 12:01, 8 May 2023 (UTC)

A propos, looking at 1973 Chilean parliamentary election it seems that Popular Unity had 82 seats between the two chambers, and with one for USOPO that makes 83, so presumably that figure of 80 was just a rough count. I'd say there's some room for improvement here. Rafaelgr (talk) 12:11, 8 May 2023 (UTC)