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Comment by lovemenot | Hacker News Reader

On reading just the abstract, there does not appear to be any control in this experiment. I'd have expected them to mention inclusion of election results known with certainty to not be fraudulent.

Likewise, I'd expect there to be proof of fraud by other reliable means in order to validate this method. It is not enough for them to just assert that there can be no other explanation for this data, so these were fraudulent results, so our method must be working.

Absent a control, the strong conclusion that fraud can be detected this way seems unsupported.

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They include Poland, Germany, and Spain, see page 10, Fig. 3 and the discussion next to it. They also say the elections prior to 2004 have no such anomaly.

I would suggest looking at the paper in more detail before saying it's uncontrolled. I found the control just by skimming the figures.

I would do so, but the site prevents access to non-subscribers.

Would you kindly tell me the method they used to independently prove fraud in some of the analysed data.

I had no trouble accessing the paper using the PDF link on the page (https://arxiv.org/pdf/1410.6059v4.pdf)

Thanks for the link to PDF. The "This URL" link takes you to a page that asks for a login.

Having now read the article, I stand by my original point. There seems to be no verification that the proposed method does indeed identify (in some cases) cases of elections that were independently known, as a point of fact, to have been fraudulent.

They seem to be claiming two things, but you cannot have it both ways :

a) This method can identify fraudulent elections and we proved it by analysing elections in Russia

b) These elections in Russia that we analysed using this method were fraudulent - as proved by the method.

I would expect to see a control that takes data from elections that were already known to be fraudulent. e.g. by confession, video evidence or some other reliable means to show that the effect was observable in some of those demonstrably fraudulent elections.

> These elections in Russia that we analysed using this method were fraudulent - as proved by the method.

Not "as proved by the method", but "as proved by the science of statistics". So let me fix it for you:

a) This method can identify fraudulent elections, because it's scientifically correct.

b) These elections in Russia that we analysed using this method were fraudulent - as proved by the science of statistics.

FYI, the paper was published in "Annals of Applied Statistics", which is a peer-reviewed journal.

I acknowledge that I am no expert, so thanks for your time to try to set me straight. If I may ask, how does statistics let them be so confident of fraud when there is no other hard evidence of fraud in their data? In other words, how can they be sure there's no other explanation, when they apparently have not yet demonstrated the effect on other known fraudulent elections?

I have asked this question in different ways, but to my (admittedly limited) understanding, the question has not been answered by you or anyone else here.

Actually there is a TON of evidence that e.g. Russian elections 2011 were heavily falsified. There are dozens (probably hundreds) reports of independent observers, plenty of videos capturing ballot stuffing, multiple cases when election papers are known to have been forged after the ballot count was finished, etc. etc. I don't know what are "reliable means" for you though; all that evidence has been outright rejected by every single Russian official or court.

Yes. And what bothers me about this study is that it seems to rely on our implicit understanding of this circumstance. Rather than using a set of data where they can explicitly compare fraudulent and legitimate results.

Surely there would have been a better set of test data than one for which politicians are still actively serving.

Unfortunately the science is somewhat tainted by the politics here since it is very unlikely they'll get independent confirmation of fraud for the test set.

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