

Russian legislative elections 2011 - statistical evidence of vote fraud - ajuc
http://antonnikolenko.blogspot.com/2011/12/russian-legislative-elections-2011.html

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pinaceae
100% turnout in chechnya, 99.87% for the ruling party of one russia....

and you need statistical evidence to detect fraud!?

~~~
diminish
all republics dominated by muslim minorities voted for the ruling party with
rates above 95%; check caucasian republics, tatarstan, bashkir..apparently
minnorities in russia love the ruling party more than russians themselves.

~~~
guard-of-terra
There perhaps is one valid reason for them to: Minorities can get big
preference by being extremelly loyal. Majority can't because there is only one
pie.

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culebron
The fed money transfers from Moscow to Caucasus and nat. republics are huge,
and that's their deal: Moscow pays, the republics' rulers provide near 100%
votes.

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malkung
Chechnya usually votes close to 100% for Putin, simply because a lot of
government money is poured in Chechnya, disproportionately more than in any
other region of Russia,

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tapir
Why would anyone think that this statistical analysis shows evidence of a
fraud?

One chart shows that there is no normal distribution for votes given to United
Russia (UR) The other chart shows that percent of people who voted for UR
grows when the number of people that voted grows

Let's think, which facts have influenced the results of voting:

А) External factors:

1) Votes falsification

B) Personal factors:

2) Authorithy of elder person, commander or tribe leaders 3) Mass-media

4) Standards of living

5) Rational thinking - when someone takes a pen and a sheet of paper and
writes down proc and cos of voting for one or another party.

The regions where UN had the biggest number of votes where:

\- rregions with large number of milinary men

\- regions located on Caucasus (where family and tribe traditions are very
strong).

There were no need to falsify election results in the Russian Army - it has
very strong pro-UR propaganda inside and have almost no information sources
other than TV which is also pro-UR

As for the Caucasus,

1) There are very strong tribe traditions there

— one for everyone and everyone for one.

— people tend tol vote as they are told by the elders

2) Opposition media sources (Kommersant FM, Musiness FM, etc which describe UR
in negative way, are not widespread in Chechen Republic. Certanly, somene can
use the Internet, but this is very small number of people in this republic

3) Russia gives this region large amount of federal money to rebuild and
renovate cities that were destroyed during prevoius wars (this even caoused
the campagin "Stop feeding the Caucasus!" "Хватит кормить Кавказ!" in other
parts of the country)

4) Rational thinking factor is evident here

5) No need for falsifications there

I do not say that there were no falsifications at all, but I think that it is
stupid to make such conclusions using only these charts.

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anghyflawn
I don't agree with the downvotes, and you have a point in that statistics
cannot _prove_ fraud. But these numbers do provide strong evidence for
irregularities.

> \- rregions with large number of milinary men

Huh? Does that include Moscow with what was it, 47% for UR? Can you name ONE
region where concerted (fair) voting by the military can have a significant
impact on the outcome?

In any case, your suggestions do not explain the spikes on "nice" numbers, nor
the fact that weighting for precinct size does not make UR voting a bell
curve, nor the huge differences in the UR vote across precincts sometimes
located _in the same building_.

~~~
malkung
Another explanation is that people working in government bodies in Russia
(including state-funded education, healthcare and military institutions) make
up some 30 million, so United Russia gets a huge number of votes just from
them. Moscow has a large army of bureaucrats, you know.

~~~
anghyflawn
And you know how they voted because?..

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kiloaper
... because they were issued with voting papers already filled in. Check out
the Al Jazeera reports on the election fraud.

~~~
anghyflawn
No, that's ballot stuffing. The grandparent seemed to mean that real people
who work in the government actually voted for UR, either of genuine conviction
or under duress from their superiors. It would be very hard to give out
filled-in paper at the voting station in full view of the monitors. The people
who received filled-in ballots were hired to go round and stuff the ballot
boxes at multiple locations.

~~~
kiloaper
Perhaps I phrased it wrong. People in the army were apparently issued with
their ballot papers already filled in. This is clearly a case of "under duress
from their superiors" to vote for a particular party. I can't a Russian
soldier asking for a clean ballot and voting for someone else.

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guard-of-terra
I've made this chart to visualize voting in Moscow.

Every person who voted (or "voted" gets one pixel on the screen, grouped in
circled depicting their voting place. Pixels are color-coded, each party has
its own color, United Russia is black.

<https://github.com/alamar/elegraph/blob/master/moscow.png>

The X axis is turnover, bigger to the right. Starts at ~25%, ends at 100% The
Y axis is % of votes given to United Russia, bigger towards bottom. starts at
~20%, ends at 100%

You can see there's something crazy going on, there is more than one center
with wildly different voting behavior plus at some places some parties got no
votes at all, plus towards the bottom a few places where all the votes went to
United Russia.

~~~
cbr
> The X axis is turnover

turnout?

~~~
guard-of-terra
Perhaps so.

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suprgeek
For some interesting mathematical techniques that can be brought to bear on
this issue, check out Benford's Law
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benford%27s_law>

If you have access to the Raw Voting numbers by district/region etc, this
technique could make for some interesting analysis.

~~~
jackpirate
It's not obvious to me how this applies. Wouldn't most fraudulent vote counts
also satisfy Benford's Law?

~~~
scott_s
I would have thought not, but this paper argues that Benford's law is not
useful for detecting voter fraud:
<http://www.vote.caltech.edu/drupal/node/327>

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huhtenberg
Now, here's the funny part.

It is widely speculated in the Russian part of the Internets that this fraud
is not Putin's doing, but rather a frame-up for Putin's party aimed at
stirring shit up in the country. The ruling party would've gotten what they
needed without this mess, and the voting fraud is allegedly a very rough hack
job that was meant to be obvious.

~~~
VladRussian
according to that graph in the article

[http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-9wJyYHagRbo/TuMibuRO59I/AAAAAAAAAM...](http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-9wJyYHagRbo/TuMibuRO59I/AAAAAAAAAMs/XNFa1uOyZkw/s1600/ven%25C3%25A4j%25C3%25A4njakaja2003)

the same frame-up was attempted in 2003, 2004, 2007, 2008, etc... It is a nice
double pay scheme that is completely in the nature of the current Russian
regime - to get and stay in power through election fraud and blame the fraud
on the opposition at the same time.

~~~
abcd_f
It's not being blamed on the opposition from what I can tell, but rather quite
squarely on the US that is meddling with Russia's internal affairs.

~~~
danielharan
Then it appears the US meddling is quite extensive!

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vaksel
you don't need statistical evidence...it's obvious fraud when the vote %s for
each party add up at 146%

~~~
lzm
I don't see how that is possible. Aren't election results released as number
of votes per party, instead of percentage of votes?

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yread
I can't help it but I'm missing comparison for the non-Putin elections. Did it
look the same? Perhaps not that many things are normally distributed in
Russia...

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malkung
Interesting. Did you look at the polling stations at the irregular spikes?
What is their number, rather than percentage. The absoulte number (even
better, the number of voters in them) would indicate what effect hey had on
the overall results. Also what regions are they in? In some very sparsely
populated regions, like North Siberia, where "mobile" polling stations are
used, the number of voters would be very small, but probably the attendance
would be close to 100%, and I would not be surprised if they all voted for
United Russia. Or, this may be due to some other peculiarity of counting what
constitutes a polling station (stations abroad, the voting mechanism for
people who were travelling on the day of the elections, etc). Also, please do
confirm where the data comes from - is it publicly available?

~~~
anghyflawn
The post points out that the station-by-turnout data are weighted, so the
"very small precinct" argument does not fly (and why would all the very small
stations all have numbers of votes that are multiples of five)? In addition,
why don't we get anything remotely like the same effect in Sweden, where large
parts of the country are also very sparsely populated,?

Polling stations abroad are counted in the same way as polling stations in
Russia. The "traveller" votes were a prime mechanism for ballot stuffing.

~~~
malkung
What is "weighted"? In which way was the percentage weighted? Why look at
(weighted) percentage of turnout rather than at raw counts?

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swah
140% on the spot!

~~~
VladRussian
well, if you add "registered voters" who isn't a living breathing person
registered at the given district (i.e. so called "dead souls") than you can
easily get beyond the 100%.

Honestly, even i (whose opinion about the old country can rarely be made worse
than it is) am impressed with the scale of the fraud. Well, 10+ years living
outside of the country ... When i was leaving, the kickbacks on government
contracts were 20-30%. Recently i learned that kickbacks are normally 75%+
these days. Strangely these numbers looks similar to what i thought and what
really is the scale of the fraud.

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skylan_q
Sorry, are there any English sources for this stuff?

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guard-of-terra
Raw data from Moscow:
[https://github.com/alamar/elegraph/blob/master/data/moscow-2...](https://github.com/alamar/elegraph/blob/master/data/moscow-2011-12-07/data.csv)
The last 6 columns are voting counts.

~~~
achompas
Thank you so much for this!

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Uncle_Sam
I see banner - WE PUT IN OUR VOICE!

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ColdAsIce
Democracy is a nice idea, cast your vote people.

Who counts the votes? That is where the power is. -- Stalin.

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CoachRufus87
numbers don't lie

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newobj
5 out of 4 poll workers agree.

