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Graph Shows Fraud in Russian Elections
gaika writes "A graph in the best traditions of Edward Tufte shows how the voting was rigged in Russian parliament elections. Initially some regions were showing higher than 100% attendance, but later on everything was corrected, or way too much corrected, as the correlation between winning party's vote and attendance now stands at 90%. I guess the people who have rigged the vote have never heard about Correlation Cofficient."
2/3 of the Russian Duma (parliament) has the authority to amend the Constitution, and of course they want to be able to do that by themselves. And they barely made it - they will have 310 +/- 5 seats out of 450.
In the first full study of Florida's ballots since the election ended, The Miami Herald and USA Today reported George W. Bush would have widened his 537-vote victory to a 1,665-vote margin if the recount ordered by the Florida Supreme Court would have been allowed to continue, using standards that would have allowed even faintly dimpled "undervotes" -- ballots the voter has noticeably indented but had not punched all the way through -- to be counted.
Neither the Miami Herald nor USA Today could remotely be considered "Bush friendly". But you still believe and repeat the lie. Shameful!
As I understand it, Putin has been reasonably effective at crushing the Oligarchies that were running rampant throughout Russia, this has made him a bit unpopular with the current US government because a lot of those Oligarchs were business partners. Unfortunately, his method of stamping them out has been largely to just take over the businesses directly. This has been a boon for the government's bottom line, but in the long run it stifles growth, however the people love it because they're finally seeing some of their country's wealth and frankly I can't blame them. I have no doubt in a few years Putin (or his successor) will finally toss away the pretense of being a Democracy and really start putting the screws to the people, but in the short term they are way better than the previous owners.
I read the internet for the articles.
http://economist.com/world/europe/displaystory.cfm?story_id=10217312
You might look at some of Steven F. Freeman's papers, like this one: Polling Bias or Corrupted Count? (pdf file).
Nope. Just the good old US corporate media. "Nothing to see here, just a bunch of conspiracy nuts on the internet"
His argument boils down to this:
There shouldn't be a correlation at all between voter turnout percentage and the percentage that voted for Putin's party.
It's like saying "all of candidate A's supporters voted, only half of candidate B's supporters voted (or were allowed, enabled, not intimidated into not voting, etc.).
They need 2/3rds in the parliament to amend constitution.
...but it's Bush who is warmongering while impoverishing his people. I'd say that Putin was above the both of them, though he will soon be ending his career with that horrific assault against the... arctic circle on his record. Oh the humanity.
Now if you'll excuse me, I'll wash my hands after partaking in one of Slashdot's redmeat xenophobe stories. Call me when you all have something positive to post about Russians or Chinese for a change: Until then, the usual Anglosphere "coverage" of the other major powers is best taken with a large grain of salt.
Standards are slipping. We did have better than 100% turnout in Chicago during the entire first Daley administration.
There is no statistic to determine fraud, almost by definition. The various statistical tests look for improbable departures from expectations, and the fraudster tries to modify the data in a way that doesn't look improbable.
Given we have few datasets of fraudulent vs non-fraudulent numbers, it is hard to generate hard numbers. Instead, we look at tests the fraudsters didn't consider or understand, and these tests usually show such extreme numbers that any statistician would assume the data was manipulated. For example:
1. Faked biology data (several known examples) - means look good, but higher order stats are way outside a normal distribution. Luckily, you can repeat the experiments, and see the repeats don't show the reported results.
2. Faked accounting data (tons of examples.) Most fakers make really basic mistakes. E.g. around 27%? of financial numbers should begin with 1, faked data usually has the wrong leading number distribution. Again, forensic accountants dig here and usualy hit paydirt.
3. Image manipulation. Again, the manipulator gets the first order stats right, but leaves a mess in terms of higher order stats (local vs global noise.)
I worked at the election committee for the last elections of Russian president. The head of the committee gave me 10 passport (which used as IDs in Russia) numbers to register. I never saw the passwords, I never saw the people. The head filled out the bulletins for those 10 people (all votes for Putin) and went into a voting booth.
I did not see much else, but I am sure it was not a unique case. Also, our district was rather small, in larger districts they probably used more "dead souls".
I am not at all surprised at the fraud in last elections. In fact, I would be surprised if there was not any. As for why - I think (and this is my speculation) each committee must report at least x% (x >> 50) votes for Putin in the last president elections or for Unified Russia in these elections to show a good work. Thus the fraud despite the fact that the elections were decided WAY before the votes were counted.
In general one would expect the dots to form vaguely horizontal bands across the graph. In other words, in districts where there was 50% turnout, 50% of the votes would be for Putin's party, and in districts with 90% turnout, approximately the same percentage (50%) of votes would be for Putin's party. That's what you wold expect from fair voting.
On the other hand, if voter turnout was, say 40-60%, and you were stuffing the ballot boxes with an additional 0-30% votes - all of them for Putin's party, you would get the kind of pattern you see in that graph. You could also get this pattern if people were being forced to go and vote for Putin's party.
There is value in free and fair elections, even if they do not alter the status quo.
All the data was uploaded and made available 1.39am UTC : http://www.swivel.com/data_sets/show/1010698
The stats were all done using swivel (probably after you commented admittedly), not livejoural, LJ is just the site he posted them.
There were complaints thet the ballots were hard to use statewide but the Dems chose to request recounts only in areas where they expected to gain proportionately more. Gore's request would have carried more weight if he had requested recounts statewide & not just in Dem dominated areas. In the end, the supreme court shut down the recounts because this method of selectively recounting meant that miscounted Dem votes would have counted more than miscounted Rep votes. However, statewide recounts would have taken even longer & would have been very unlikely to have reversed Florida's pro Bush vote.
Democracy is a sheep and two wolves deciding what to have for lunch. Freedom is a well armed sheep contesting the issue
As someone else mentioned - Putin's party was going to win majority in a rigged or fair election. But in a fair election they most likely wouldn't get a super majority to push through constitutional changes.
The Beslan school hostage situation was in late August (or early September) 2004 - about 3 years and 3 months ago. Now, maybe that's still not current, but it's very different from the 6 years you were exaggerating to in your post.
Yet, why would Czar Vladimir Putin go through all this trouble to produce an impressive showing at the polls? He is already quite popular. His party, United Russia, could have easily won control of the Duma without the election rigging.
"The Economist" has finally provided an answer to this puzzling question. "The answer almost certainly lies in the ever more vicious--and open--rivalry among the Kremlin's political clans. Perhaps Mr Putin upset so many rich and powerful people that the prospect of losing control over the transition of power may simply have been too dangerous for his inner circle, and for himself. For all his talk about foreign threats and domestic enemies, what Mr Putin really fears is his entourage and a war among the clans. Winston Churchill once described the Kremlin's political tussles as being like a fight among bulldogs under a carpet: outsiders hear plenty of growling but have few clues about the victor's identity until it emerges."
Renegade political factions (run by former and current members of the FSB, successor of the KGB) operate within and outside the Kremlin. Each faction is like a gang, and the gangs kill each other. They answer to no one. So far, Putin has used his power to keep the factions under control.
Putin needed an impressive showing in the election in order to demonstrate his political power -- to the siloviki. He controls the United Russia party. Since the party won more than 66% of the seats in the Duma (due to the rigged election), the party -- and Putin -- can alter the constitution at will.
Of course, Putin is gambling that his scheme will work. He may lose the gamble. One of the renegade factions may assassinate him.
In this context, you can understand the comments by Mikhail Gorbachev. Gorbachev won the Nobel Peace Prize for releasing the Eastern Europeans from the yoke of Soviet oppression. He has criticized the steadily eroding freedoms that he initiated in Russia in the late 1980s, but he has refrained from directly criticizing Czar Vladimir Putin.
Putin is indeed a czar, but he is a far better ruler than one of the thugs in the siloviki. These thugs likely killed both Alexander Litvinenko and Anna Politkovskaya. Even if Putin wanted to solve their murders, he has no power to do so. If he attempted to find the killers, then he may be killed.
P.S.
"The Economist" seems to provide much better analysis of Russian politics than Washington provides. What exactly are our Russian "experts" in Washington doing?
I am from Ekaterinburg, Sverdlovskaya oblast, Russia.
Also, all government employees were forced to vote (e.g. teachers).
The Sunday was made a working day in some institutes (4 in our city) to make students vote right there.
Obviously, soldiers, prisoners and mental patients all voted for Putin's party.
I've seen a lot of things of this kind here.
Check again, it says it was never undertaken.
Read right under that:
"After the election, USA Today, The Miami Herald, and Knight Ridder commissioned accounting firm BDO Seidman to count undervotes, that is, ballots which did not register any vote when counted by machine. BDO Seidman's results, reported in USA Today , show that under the strictest standard, where only a cleanly punched ballot with a fully removed chad was counted, Gore won by three votes.[15] Under all other standards, Bush won, with Bush's margin increasing as looser standards were used. The standards considered by BDO Seidman were:
* Lenient standard. Any alteration in a chad, ranging from a dimple to a full punch, counts as a vote. By this standard, Bush won by 1,665 votes.
* Palm Beach standard. A dimple is counted as a vote if other races on the same ballot show dimples as well. By this standard, Bush won by 884 votes.
* Two-corner standard. A chad with two or more corners removed is counted as a vote. This is the most common standard in use. By this standard, Bush won by 363 votes.
* Strict standard. Only a fully removed chad counts as a vote. By this standard, Gore won by 3 votes.
"
"A larger consortium of news organizations, including the USA Today, the Miami Herald, Knight Ridder, the Tampa Tribune, and five other newspapers next conducted a full recount of all ballots, including both undervotes and overvotes. According to their results, under stricter standards for vote counting, Bush won, and under looser standards, Gore won. [16] However, a Gore win was impossible without a recount of overvotes, which he did not request."
Hardly. Reports of Airbus's decline have been greatly exaggerated (as were the reports about Boeing's decline a few years before that). Airbus shot itself in the foot with the electrical problems on the A380 en is suffering from the low dollar but both problem are being addressed. Considering that some 35 years after being founded it sells a little more that half the worlds large jet aircraft, I'd say calling it a success is valid.
(Though I'm not sure it ever qualified as a state-controlled enterprise)
*sigh* the neo-liberal propaganda again. Europe is doing fine. Unemployment in the EU down to a reasonable seven percent (including around 3% for states like Denmark and the Netherlands with very large welfare systems). Growth is healthy and comparable with the US.
I quite fail to see how a 35 hour workweek or 6 weeks of paid leave (not to mention universal healthcare and good consumer protection) are bad things.
Concerning the "sense of snivelling self righteousness" I'd offer a) a request for some examples b) the possibility that it might me justified and c) a mirror/look at the US government.
Interestingly enough, with all the fraud, they've still failed - only 59% of those eligible to vote did so, and of those, 64.3% voted for Putin's United Russia. That makes 38% of all voters, much less impressive. Of course, now they're bending the figures anyway - Putin himself had said recently that he takes the result of elections to be 90% support for himself, since other elected parties have on one or another occasion also supported his policies.
According to a quick check of Wikipedia, the Florida counties involved in the hand recounts were Broward, Miami Dade, Palm Beach, and Volusia. The issues in Florida revolved around counting problems and ballot design. Of the four counties involved in the recount, the first three are heavily Democrat controlled, while Volusia is not. (Although according to the NY Times, Volusia was hostile to Bush in the 2000 election anyway). The infamous "Butterfly" ballot was designed by a Democrat controlled county election board (Palm Beach County Supervisor of Elections Theresa Lepore, who was elected as a registered Democrat). Do you think Palm Beach county designed the ballot in order to get Bush elected, or that they're just incompetent Democrats who thought the larger print would help elderly voters vote in more Democrats?
The state of Florida didn't design or count the ballots at issue in the 2000 election, they just certified the results. The counties at issue were not Bush-friendly. Trying to blame Bush or Republicans for somehow creating the mess by magically controlling them is ridiculous.
The complaints in Ohio in 2004 revolved around vote counting/re-counting as well as polling place availability and voting machine availability. Both were supposedly issues in the voting locations where Kerry had the most support, in densely populated areas.
Now, knowing that densely populated areas were heavily Democrat controlled (hence why they also went for Kerry) and that in Ohio the County elections board deals with all counting issues, do you think it's reasonable that in a heavily Democrat controlled county the Democrat elections board was miscounting things in order to favor Bush?
So let's take machine availability and malfunctions. Cuyahoga County was at the center of the controversy. Like the other counties in Ohio, they buy their own voting machines (although they wanted the State to pay them back for replacing the Diebold machines that caused them problems). Want to review the 54 pages of Democrat elected officials in the county? Do you really think they were conspiring to disenfranchise their own Democrat voters in order to throw the election to Bush? Or is it more likely that they're just more incompetent Democrats who weren't able to organize the voting process in their County?
I mentioned precincts as well as counties because in Ohio, the word was that certain heavily Democrat precincts had problems with their voting machines. Since they're heavily Democrat precincts, do you really think that the Precinct people there were Republicans in control of the Precinct polling location? You can do the research to prove that it wasn't, but instead certain people choose to believe something that doesn't even make sense on the face of it, that somehow a cabal of Republicans managed to physically control precincts in heavily Democrat areas in order to suppress their votes.
They're such stupid accusations it's hard to see why anyone with even the most basic knowledge of the elections process could take them seriously. As for the original point, he wanted to run statistical tests on the 2000 and 2004 elections for those "problem" areas in order to analyze whether similar problems to the recent Russian election occurred. My original point was that the actual voting process in those "problem" areas was controlled by Democrats, so what incentive did they have to somehow arrange to alter vote totals to favor Bush?
Putin controlled the election machinery in Russia. Bush, nor the Republicans, controlled the election machinery in the vast majority of areas that were claimed to be problems in the 2000 and 2004 elections. There's no real comparison possible.
The party of stupid and the party of evil get together and do something both stupid and evil, then call it bipartisan.