> Is the evidence of massive voter fraud in the West so unsettling that you have to downvote me?
Not downvoting you. But if fraud turns out to be the case, I'm going to be unsettled as hell. It should be unsettling if you live and/or care about democracy in the West, obviously. I doubt we disagree about this though :)
But even if no fraud is suspected or if it finds nothing, this is data science. Unlike say medicine or food science, there's no shortage of data (in theory). So if there's a country that we can reasonably be sure about their democracy is entirely above the table[0], throw it into the test and use that to calibrate the others.
One problem I believe is that there is no such thing as "the test" :-)
This research was done based in a particular system of elections--if you look beyond your own democratic system (or the way you've learned in school how it's supposed to work), you'll know how insanely different they all are. The fact that we actually use a single word "democracy" to describe them all is pretty crazy, now that I think about it.
Both the numbers themselves (what aggregate counts are available) and the specific way of fraud suspected (which you kind of need for a statistical hypothesis) depend heavily on the democratic system involved. For instance that messy thing with the US elections a while back, second term of Bush IIRC, whether there was fraud or not, it was fought over a couple of hundreds of votes in one district or county, was it not?
To disappear or push a few hundred votes one way or another requires a different type of fraud, and therefore statistical testing, than say, the type of fraud that makes a whole country of several hundred million almost always divide their votes between two options so close to 50/50 that a few hundred votes can swing the outcome in the first place.
And that's just one country. So much different creative ways to mess up whatever is locally deemed to constitute democracy, you probably need at least an equal amount of different creative ways to statistically test whether they're fraudulent or not.
[0] come to think of it, maybe there is a shortage of data ...