Russian legislative elections 2011 - statistical evidence of vote fraud | Hacker News Reader

Russian legislative elections 2011 - statistical evidence of vote fraud

antonnikolenko.blogspot.com

291 pointsajuc57 comments

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

and you need statistical evidence to detect fraud!?

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.

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.

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.

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,

The societies there are quasi-tribal and almost everyone votes for who their elder tells them to. The elder sells the votes for favors for their tribe.

You just presented statistical evidence.

I think the point is that there's a difference between 'obvious statistical evidence' and 'non-obvious statistical evidence.' Often the results of statistics can be counterintuitive due to issues like sample size, confidence intervals, etc.

Have you ever looked at the vote tally in American cities?

In my city, there was only one candidate (running for judge) in the last election who didn't run on the democratic line. Another candidate was running on the Democrat, Republican, Conservative, Working Family and Independence party lines.

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.

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.

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.

And you know how they voted because?..

Because their management told them how to vote.

But that's a non sequitur. Sure, there was some pressure to actually vote UR (and that is not a sign of a free and fair election either), but what the statistics seems to show is that the final result consisted of a certain number of genuine UR votes (some of them coerced), most likely somewhere in the 30-35% region, plus the anomalous component, which we know, thanks to the election monitors, to have included (a) multiple voting; (b) ballot stuffing; (c) outright rewriting of protocols. Realistically, there is no way genuine behavioural differences could account for the multiple-of-five spikes, or to the huge variation across results in the same neighbourhood that you find so often in Moscow. And all those precincts in downtown Moscow with 80% UR and five votes for Yabloko? Puh-leez.

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

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.

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.

Because bureaucracy has grown a lot under Putin, and those people might as well lose jobs if some other party comes to power. Also think about increases in salaries and pensions, before the elections, etc. But these do not count as direct vote-rigging.

> I don't agree with the downvotes,

The ruling class of HN can be wrong?!? Say it isn't so!

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.

> The X axis is turnover

turnout?

Perhaps so.

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.

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

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

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.

according to that graph in the article

http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-9wJyYHagRbo/TuMibuRO59I/AAAAAAAAAM...

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.

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.

Then it appears the US meddling is quite extensive!

  It is widely speculated in the Russian part 
  of the Internets [...]

Not at all. This is the first time I see it proposed seriously, and I monitor the Russian internets quite closely.

I second that. If this is anti-Putin frame-up, he would be the first to investigate election fraud. Actually the opposite is the case, russian authorities repeatedly say that elections were clean and fair.

Not at all. The majority of the people aren't that fool. I'd say you can't fool others at all: earlier or later this gets discovered.

A small number of the ruling party supporters do suppose this. I guess part of them are real zealots, but there is another part that are just paid for blog & news comments. (Screenshots of announcements of such jobs were circulating recently.)

Now, the problem is if we (Russians) can achieve anything with this evidence. The quality of the political opposition is very low. Most of them do fight each other more than work for the people's needs.

Huhtenberg, care to provide a link, please?

Do you mean the head of the election commission's ridiculous claim that all the videos of ballot stuffing, multiple voting etc. were filmed in advance by the opposition? The only thing that the Russian internets do with this claim widely is ridicule.

You, Sir, are Surkovite propaganda.

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

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

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...

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?

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.

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

140% on the spot!

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.

In this case it's an obvious fraud, but technically such an outcome is possible and legal: voters can take a special paper and vote at another spot, rather than their home one (say, if they are in another city). So, in theory 140% can be achieved.

Sorry, are there any English sources for this stuff?

Can't find any English sources, but here's the link to what appears to be the source for most of the charts: http://peregrins.com/elect/results.csv.gz

And here is the official (government-provided) results: http://www.izbirkom.ru/region/izbirkom, also in Russian, but Chrome does an OK job translating it.

I did NOT check if the table from the first link is consistent with the data in the official results. Somebody more determined than I should do that. This page: http://eugenyboger.livejournal.com/4514.html publishes the scripts used for composing the csv file from the official results.

Try these two http://www-personal.umich.edu/~wmebane/apsa09.pdf http://www-personal.umich.edu/~wmebane/mw10B.pdf

fraud methods don't vary from election to election.

... the blog post is in english. Or so it appears to me - am I lost somewhere in a Douglas Adams novel?

The blog posts in in English, yes. But he's asking about the sources for the data in the post.

Yes, this! :)

Raw data from Moscow: https://github.com/alamar/elegraph/blob/master/data/moscow-2... The last 6 columns are voting counts.

Thank you so much for this!

I see banner - WE PUT IN OUR VOICE!

Democracy is a nice idea, cast your vote people.

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

numbers don't lie

5 out of 4 poll workers agree.

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