> According to the theory, in fair elections, turnout indicators typically follow a regular graphical representation that resembles a bell shape. If anomalies appear in the data -- for example, forms different from the bell shape or the bell "grows a tail" -- this indicates unfair elections.
There is *no* respectable statistician who would *ever* draw a conclusion from data. You could say 'may indicate evidence of unfair elections,' but it is impossible to deem whether something occurred or not with 100% certainty.
Now to address their "indicators."
> While in cities the data representation mostly follows a bell shape, in the regions it is anomalously deviated
All statistics is just a representation of data, it tells us nothing of logic. Logic is also based in axioms and it's important to identify what those are.
Here the author is saying the data is "anomalously deviated" with the axiomatic assumption that all voters must follow the same distribution, but why should this assumption be held true? It ignores other logical factors that may sway these distributions.
If I'm a candidate for a political position that would give a rural precinct free money, wouldn't that heavily affect that population's voting outcomes? Surely what's said in a political campaign can sway these things, yet there's nothing in the article that mentions that.
> According to the theory, if a number of stations emerge where one candidate -- the "beneficiary" -- is unusually high, this might indicate falsification. There's a high risk of manipulation where increased overall voter turnout is reflected only in support of the "beneficiary."
So the belief is that because there are 2 distributions for the number of precincts with a certain percentage of "yes" votes, that automatically "indicates falsification"? There needs to be more information than this to make a conclusion. What one holds as axioms are a matter of opinion.
The only way to get something useful out of a counterargument to this is for a proponent to exhaustively list all the votes they think are legitimate, and for the opponent to show the same patterns can occur there as well.
Similarly for a proponent to convince detractors, they'd have to show that other elections they see as legitimate *never* indicate those patterns. Otherwise this is just an opinion piece on data.