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Comment by anghyflawn | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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 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.

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.

> I don't agree with the downvotes,

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

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