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."

Comments

Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

Putin's 7% cap on political parties pretty much annihilated most of the opposition. Why did they need to add votes? Out of habit?

Re:Why?

[Escogido]

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.

Re:Why?

[cptdondo]

Heh. If you read the Russian, Chechnya (or however you spell it in western alphabet) has the highest turnout - 10,000% - and a perfect score - 100% - in voting for Putin.

Lesse - last I heard, they were still fighting the Chechen rebels, nyet?

Re:Why?

[arivanov]

I suspect he did not. In fact I suspect none of his immediate surrounding did. As many people pointed out they had no need whatsoever to do it.

Now, cronies and henchmen in remote regions are a completely different story.

Realistically, the feudalism never went away in the Soviet Union (and Russia for that matter). Many of the remote places and nearly all of the so called "autonomous republics" and "autonomous areas" are ruled in a feudal manner. In fact usually the rule inherited from father to son.

It is essential for a vassal to demonstrate his true loyalty to the ruling feudal. In the middle ages it was the oath of allegiance. Now it is votes. This is exactly what is happening here. Chechnia, various tatar states and other fiefdoms demonstrating their loyalty to the king. Move along people, there is nothing we can do to fix it for at least a 100 more years. Old habits die hard. Really hard.

Also, they are a blip on the overall statistics radar. In total we are talking about less votes than Moscow and St Petersburg which were not rigged and had the highest opposition representation which were not rigged this way. In fact I would expect less than 2-3% of the overall vote to be subjected to such rigging (the fiefdoms in question are not particularly large).

The real killer was the strict prohibition on foreign funding.

There were anything between 30-200 million of American money behind every mid-right wing win in Eastern Europe for the last 15 years (I have personally seen some of it). Without this level of support none of the right-wing "blue" muppets would have gotten even close to winning an election in Bulgaria, Romania, etc. By yanking the plug and making sure that none of the local oligarghs gives money to the opposition Putin has guaranteed his win. The 7% was simply a topup just to make sure.

You don't need brains to be a dictator

[crath]

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!

Re:You don't need brains to be a dictator

[Anonymous Coward]

just a rampant willingness to fuck people over. Depending on the context of that statement, it could describe both our current and former leader.

Detailed tests?

[Iwanowitch]

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.

Re:Detailed tests?

[Gorobei]

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.)

Those who count the votes...

[xs650]

"Those who cast the votes decide nothing. Those who count the votes decide everything." Josef Stalin

Re:Where did the data come from?

[Escogido]

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..

Re:What happened to the great Russian Mathematicia

[eli pabst]

A.N. Kolmogorov must be weeping. Too much Smirnov apparently.

God, I can't tell you how long I've been waiting to use that :-]

Re:"rigged Elections"

[phayes]

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.

Deadly Power Games in the Kremlin

[reporter]

This election was clearly rigged. According to a report by the "Guardian Unlimited", "in Chechnya 99.3% of the population were said to have voted for Putin's party [...] while in the republic of Mordovia the figure was apparently 109%." How does a politician earn 109% of the votes without rigging? In 2004, Gennady Zyuganov, head of the Communist Party, had insightfully warned, "This is not an election, it's a special [Kremlin] operation with a predetermined result." ("The Washinton Post", 2004 March 14)

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?

Yep, that is true

[gritzko]

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.