
Russian election data revisited (2018) - rahimiali
https://rss.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/j.1740-9713.2018.01141.x
======
pcl
A couple friends of mine published a paper several years ago covering a few
approaches to detecting election fraud based on numerical analysis of the
results. I wonder whether the election discussed in this article would pass
their test.

PDF: [https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-
core/c...](https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-
core/content/view/AD86EEBC2F199E2C8A2FD36BD3799DF9/S1047198700013103a.pdf/what_the_numbers_say_a_digitbased_test_for_election_fraud.pdf)

EDIT: also, the posted article probably deserves a [2018], since it's a
discussion of Putin's 2018 re-election, not the recent referendum on (among
other things) term limits.

~~~
jeffbee
Interestingly Putin changed nothing for 2020. His most recent election is even
more polluted with these artifacts. Plotting turnout vs winner fraction gives
you a grid pattern, instead of a cloud like you’d expect.

See this tweet by the first-named author of the article.
[https://twitter.com/hippopedoid/status/1278775568968933379/p...](https://twitter.com/hippopedoid/status/1278775568968933379/photo/1)

------
082349872349872
That we're down to subtleties of this sort shows some progress.

In the US south, before
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baker_v._Carr](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baker_v._Carr)
, it was apparently popular to commit voter fraud by weighting votes in some
areas more strongly than votes in others.

After that case, those committing fraud were so naive that all the dead people
voted _in alphabetical order_. (IIRC the story continues: after arriving in
the state Senate, the first order of business for the properly-winning
candidate was a debate on _how long_ someone had to be dead before they
couldn't vote anymore.)

[https://www.atlantamagazine.com/news-culture-articles/the-
fi...](https://www.atlantamagazine.com/news-culture-articles/the-first-
campaign-an-excerpt-from-jimmy-carters-new-memoir-a-full-life/)

(In my voting jurisdiction we always conduct elections by mail. The last time
there was a fraud, not only did all the people whose ballots were stolen
report it, but the ballots had all been returned filled in with the same pen
and same handwriting. I am glad we don't have "voting machines.")

A lagniappe, Leningrad singing about russian small-town politics:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q1J5lUKnD4I](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q1J5lUKnD4I)

~~~
tasty_freeze
It is very important to use the proper terms.

Voter fraud is when a person sells their vote, or impersonates a different
voter.

Election fraud is when the people in charge of collecting the votes manipulate
the vote total in some way, such discarding some of the votes of people from a
known party, manipulating voting equipment to skew the tally.

Why does it matter? Because some people claim rampant voter fraud as an excuse
for restricting voting rights, despite the fact it has been shown repeatedly
to be inconsequential [1]. At the same time, election fraud is a more
significant issue because it simply scales better, yet most people don't
appreciate the difference between voter fraud and election fraud.

For a counter point see [2], the heritage foundation keeps a list of voter
fraud cases. I'd argue it proves the opposite of their point. Their database
goes back at least 15 years and 1000 cases out of hundreds of millions of
votes cast in that period. Also, their list is maximalist -- including cases
such as "Larry Reker, of Worthington, voted twice in a contentious Independent
School District 518 bond referendum special election, once in person and once
by absentee ballot".

[1] [https://www.pbs.org/weta/washingtonweek/blog-post/numbers-
vo...](https://www.pbs.org/weta/washingtonweek/blog-post/numbers-voter-fraud)

[2]
[https://www.heritage.org/voterfraud/search?state=TX](https://www.heritage.org/voterfraud/search?state=TX)

------
zcw100
Benford’s Law
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benford%27s_law#Accounting_f...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benford%27s_law#Accounting_fraud_detection)

------
theelous3
I want to see this run on reesult sets from trustworthy elections. I don't get
the impression that their monte carlo approach is a great baseline.

Then again I'm essentially illiterate on this subject.

------
grishka
And here's one my friend made about the constitution amendments voting that
completed a week ago:
[https://popravke.net/anomalies.html](https://popravke.net/anomalies.html)

You can clearly see the exact same pattern (click "Диаграмма распределения" at
the top), and it's more pronounced than ever.

~~~
ShroudedNight
In an attempt to save others the effort of looking things up, as far as I can
tell, the two axes are:

Horizontal axis (явка) --> Voter Turnout

Vertical axis (результата) --> Result

------
learnstats2
More related to the headline than the article but I was once at an election
count where a candidate received 10,000 votes.

The returning officer read out (something like): "Candidate One, four thousand
three hundred and seventy nine. Candidate Two, ten thousand. Candidate
Three,..."

He was immediately interrupted by the buzz of people in the room trying to
work out what just happened.

~~~
JoeSmithson
Like how Everest was measured to be exactly 29000ft (in 1850s) but they
thought no-one would believe how accurately they had surveyed it, so they
reported it as 29002ft

------
bluesign
I think this study is little flawed, I would appreciate if someone with more
statistics background can comment.

I think:

\- monte carlo simulation is not good to compare with election results. At
least you have households tend to vote similar. Or some region more likely to
vote on one candidate.

\- also some percentages should be more likely, given the size of N
considering first point.

------
scottlocklin
Integer percentages are not indications of anything but rounding. I'm pretty
sure you could find percentage rounding anywhere there are humans involved.
Seriously; the null here is just gibberish.

You can use Benford's law to detect made up counts like people did with Bernie
Madoff's frauds; they're not doing that.

~~~
acqq
> You can use Benford's law to detect made up counts like people did with
> Bernie Madoff's frauds

Do you know more than what is claimed in this article (1) ?

1) [https://www.businessinsider.com/2008/12/by-one-measure-
madof...](https://www.businessinsider.com/2008/12/by-one-measure-madoffs-
returns-looked-legitimate)

"Paul Kedrosky ran the numbers found the distribution to be right in line with
what Benford would predict for a legitimate fund"

~~~
scottlocklin
Pre coffee statement; no, I got the same result:
[https://scottlocklin.wordpress.com/2009/03/13/bernie-
versus-...](https://scottlocklin.wordpress.com/2009/03/13/bernie-versus-
benford/)

------
dmurray
No one can really be surprised that there's a certain amount of voter fraud in
Russia.

And the Russian leadership is not unsophisticated: of course they have access
to mathematicians who could advise on how to avoid leaving these artifacts in
the manipulated data.

I'd conclude from this that they don't mind others knowing they manipulate the
results. Perhaps they even want them to know, as a little fuck-you show of
power.

So why have elections at all? Because it gives Russia's international allies
something to point to: they can claim to support democracy and human rights,
etc, and pretend not to be convinced by this kind of circumstantial evidence,
to an extent they would feel uncomfortable with if Putin were to decree
"right, no more elections, no more constitution, I'll just rule for life". If
you're really pressed and have to admit you find the evidence convincing, it
only really demonstrates vote totals being manipulated by up to 1%. A tiny
amount of the margin of victory and comparable to the levels of election fraud
in large democracies like India or the US.

This kind of plausible deniability is what international relations is built
on, and the bigger a power you are, the less plausible your stories have to
be. Russian troops fight in the Ukraine while on vacation. China needs
airfields in the Spratly Islands to support local fishermen. Guantanamo Bay is
run in accordance with the Geneva Convention and definitely no one gets
tortured there.

~~~
CWuestefeld
_the Russian leadership is not unsophisticated: of course they have access to
mathematicians who could advise on how to avoid leaving these artifacts in the
manipulated data.

I'd conclude from this that they don't mind others knowing they manipulate the
results._

I think you can just as easily get to the opposite conclusion, that they SO
MUCH want to keep it quiet that they don't trust anyone including their
mathematicians. And because the leaders themselves are mathematically
unsophisticated (even if they're smart in general), they didn't know that this
could happen.

~~~
dmurray
It's not a tiny conspiracy though. It seems like the data is being manipulated
for every precinct, in subtly different ways in different regions. So the
manipulation is being done by whoever is in charge of reporting for each city
or region, or at least they're aware of it (since the final numbers wouldn't
match their tallies).

------
leot
The headline shouldn’t use the term “voter fraud” as it’s a concept invented
after the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act [1] to (one presumes) restrict
democratic participation.

“Election fraud”, “electoral fraud”, are all far better for many reasons.

If you must refer to the other concept, “voter impersonation fraud” is the
appropriate term.

[1]
[https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=voter+fraud&ye...](https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=voter+fraud&year_start=1800&year_end=2008&corpus=15&smoothing=3&share=&direct_url=t1%3B%2Cvoter%20fraud%3B%2Cc0)

