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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."
Putin's 7% cap on political parties pretty much annihilated most of the opposition. Why did they need to add votes? Out of habit?
I heard people in hospitals were denied medications unless they voted for him. Very mean and dishonist thing to do. 1st post by the way :)
"I guess the people who have rigged the vote have never heard about Correlation Cofficient."
And apparently neither has the person who wrote the summary.
Paul Grosfield - the quicker picker upper.
Ballots stuff you?
I guess the people who have rigged the vote have never heard about Correlation Cofficient.
You don't need brains to run a dictatorship, just a rampant willingness to fuck people over. Reminds me of some of our own leaders here in The West!
I mean really! Dissident journalists have been murdered. A rival was imprisoned for political reasons. Gee, and I thought this election had a shot to be a fair one! Anyone surprised by this doesn't follow Russian politics at all. Putin doesn't play around. He used one of the most devious Russian reversals of all time. He found that in Soviet Russia corruption empowers you absolutely!
I got a catholic block.
This doesn't surprise me at all, I guess anybody that follows what happens in Russia suspected this. Still, it will be interesting to see how much evidence is left behind or in other words, how good a job they did at rigging the election ;-)
Everything I write is lies, read between the lines.
American Democracy is truly spreading across the globe.
If you could reason with religious people, there would be no religious people
For comparisons' sake I would like to see the same graph of percentage vs turnout in the presidential race for Florida counties in 2000 and Ohio counties in 2004.
What a lot of people don't understand here in the US is that Putin is really effing popular in Russia. We hear a lot of talk about how Putin silences critics, wants to set up an ex-KGB dictatorship, etc. And it's probably all true. But again. Putinism is popular and Russians will keep voting for it. This is no surprise if you talk to more than a handful of Russians. They don't need to commit electoral fraud because they've already got the populace on their side.
I didn't realize the extent of this until I started dating a Russian, who introduced me to many Russian viewpoints, friends and relatives.
A.N. Kolmogorov must be weeping.
It certainly seems like the distribution of the red dots is different from the others from a graphical impression.. But can someone remind me on what the correct statistical procedure is to 'determine fraud' here? Nonparametric ANOVA, comparing the groups? I mean, noting that the correlation coefficient is 0.9 doesn't really prove anything, does it...
I've had some statistics but I was never really good at it... I developed a radar for lousy statistics, though. Hard numbers please.
One CS student VS 893 DOS games: Let's play oldies
The most interesting question: why have they done that? I live in Russia and nobody here really doubts that the ruling party ("United Russia" - "Edinaja Rossija") influenced elections.
The real approval rates of other opposition parties (communists excepted) were in single percents, anyway. And the real approval rate of United Russia was high enough - all manipulations possibly resulted in several extra seats in parliament for them. So it's not that Putin seriously risked losing his power.
Putin has been successful in changing all that; I would imagine the giving people enough to eat and decent housing can excuse a lot of police-state abuses.
For example, that WSJ article covered a Soviet-era glass factory that was originally a very outmoded, inefficient industrial plant, but with the result of millions of dollars of foreign investment, is now earning lots of export rubles by manufacturing automobile windshields.
You know what they said about Mussolini: "At least he made the trains run on time".
Request your free CD of my piano music.
And we all know the power of, The Graph!
About reputable news sources is that they have, well, a reputation for doing at least a decent job of statistics. Livejournal... doesn't.
On the other hand, the nice thing about statistics is that without much work you can show what numbers you started with, what games you played with them, and what numbers you ended up with. And you can fairly easy say why you think those games were legitimate, and others can fairly easily say why they think they are or aren't, or can otherwise review your methodology.
So, if we're going to link to Livejournal as our source of statistics, can we at least link to pages that showed their work, just like they were taught in math class?
I know enough statistics to at least form a rough opinion on whether what they're stating is meaningful -- which is completely useless given the total lack of any data or discussion of methods. Yes, that stuff from math class did actually have a point.
"Those who cast the votes decide nothing. Those who count the votes decide everything." Josef Stalin
Can someone give a better explanation? I'm taking actuarial mathematics and multiple regression courses, and even I have no clue what the guy is talking about.
That graph was produced in Excel. I don't think Edward Tufte would like it.
http://economist.com/world/europe/displaystory.cfm?story_id=10217312
Most likely from the GAS "Vybory" (short for State Automatized System "Elections") that is used to calculate preliminary voting results.
I worked for 9 years in the Central Election Commission of Russia, and during my time a lot of technical people had access to the database, and it's not really hard to grab a copy of the DB or a report. I quit that job some years ago, but somehow I doubt a lot of things changed.
This is not a security hole; the data is entered into the system straight from the signed protocol as soon as a lower level election commission does, and protocols are being made public right after they are signed. It also has no official status, at the data is only used for preliminary figures; the official results have to be delivered in paper form.
While we're at it, the site of the Central Election Commission is http://www.cikrf.ru/ and the present election results will be eventually posted at http://www.cikrf.ru/elect_duma/npa/index.jsp. This is in Russian however, so I don't know how useful that would be..
It's impressive to have better than a 100% turn out when so few vote in this country. With the help of our current administration and Diebold maybe we can do as well in the next election. Hell this is America we should shoot for 200% voting!
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"
In the US, UK and other countries with a "first past the post" scheme, the whole system is perpetually rigged in favour of two parties. Small parties find it very difficult because their support is spread thinly. Even if a new party comes along with some amazing ideas, it will likely never get a single seat due to the nature of the electoral system.
If the way of voting was always rigged to favour one particular party, we would be up in arms, but having a system rigged in favour of two parties is not much better.
God, I can't tell you how long I've been waiting to use that
"Comrade commissar, someone broke into the party head quarters. But don't worry, nothing irreplacable or secret was stolen. Only the manifest and the next five election results."
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
...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.
Putin is so popular in Russia (really) that he doesn't need to rig anyting. He would have won anyways. In Russia, most of the population indeed respects Putin and this is a result of all his years as a president. You may say he gradually eliminated opposition and I will agree. But he and whoever helps him are truly amazing in their ability to build a personal cult. I don't live in Russia anymore but I have a lot of friends there - and I saw their opinion gradually warming up to Putin. Part of this is manipulation, part real result of stabilization he oversaw. At this moment, I am not sure he's a bad choice - two next popular parties are communists and Dgirinovsky - I would vote for Putin given that choice.
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.
Are you telling me that you do not trust the Putin's party won 99% of the electorate in Chechnya? Those people LOVE Putin.
In Florida, 13 counties reported more votes than voters, these accounting for 39.4% of the vote. In Ohio, at the Gahana 1 Precinct, Bush received 6,253 votes, Kerry 1,916 votes, and the others, 23. This totals 8,192 votes, which is strange, since only 4,346 people voted.
At another Precinct in Gahana, Ohio, 4,258 votes were cast for Bush and only 260 for Kerry, while only 638 people were registered as having voted.
Another source. These sorts of ridiculous "errors" could be seen when searching the online results at the time.
When discussing the history of dictators and Russia, comparisons with Hitler are entirely appropriate.
Maybe we should formulate a corollary to Godwin's law that in any history discussing that appropriately talks about Hitler and WWII, some adolescent nitwit will try to quell the debate by invoking Godwin's law.
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.
I like your comment "How even then he tried to cover his accent..."
Hmmm, he wants to blend in with the natives... I wonder why? hmmm, let's think on this one...
Oh yeah I got it, maybe because he was a spy?
I remember when Bush met Putin for the first time and said, "I looked the man in the eyes..."
At that point I thought, Bush, are you daft? The man in front of you was (is?) a spy and he would try to make himself appear like the Dali Lama himself...
I once asked a Russian when Putin was elected whether he was good or bad for the country. He replied, "does it matter?" I was completely surprised by this answer. He explained himself and said, "Mother Russia has always been ruled by an iron fist, and no politics whether communism, a tzar or free market will change that. Russia is one of the few places where a powerful person will drive over the shoes of a policeman, and the policeman will smile and say, "thank-you you are free to do that again""
"You can't make a race horse of a pig"
"No," said Samuel, "but you can make very fast pig"