Russian election data revisited (2018)

PDF: https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/c...

EDIT: also, the posted article probably deserves a [2018], since it's a discussion of Putin's 2018 re-election, not the recent referendum on (among other things) term limits.

In the US south, before https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baker_v._Carr , it was apparently popular to commit voter fraud by weighting votes in some areas more strongly than votes in others.

After that case, those committing fraud were so naive that all the dead people voted in alphabetical order. (IIRC the story continues: after arriving in the state Senate, the first order of business for the properly-winning candidate was a debate on how long someone had to be dead before they couldn't vote anymore.)

https://www.atlantamagazine.com/news-culture-articles/the-fi...

(In my voting jurisdiction we always conduct elections by mail. The last time there was a fraud, not only did all the people whose ballots were stolen report it, but the ballots had all been returned filled in with the same pen and same handwriting. I am glad we don't have "voting machines.")

A lagniappe, Leningrad singing about russian small-town politics: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q1J5lUKnD4I

Then again I'm essentially illiterate on this subject.

You can clearly see the exact same pattern (click "Диаграмма распределения" at the top), and it's more pronounced than ever.

The returning officer read out (something like): "Candidate One, four thousand three hundred and seventy nine. Candidate Two, ten thousand. Candidate Three,..."

He was immediately interrupted by the buzz of people in the room trying to work out what just happened.

I think:

- monte carlo simulation is not good to compare with election results. At least you have households tend to vote similar. Or some region more likely to vote on one candidate.

- also some percentages should be more likely, given the size of N considering first point.

You can use Benford's law to detect made up counts like people did with Bernie Madoff's frauds; they're not doing that.

And the Russian leadership is not unsophisticated: of course they have access to mathematicians who could advise on how to avoid leaving these artifacts in the manipulated data.

I'd conclude from this that they don't mind others knowing they manipulate the results. Perhaps they even want them to know, as a little fuck-you show of power.

So why have elections at all? Because it gives Russia's international allies something to point to: they can claim to support democracy and human rights, etc, and pretend not to be convinced by this kind of circumstantial evidence, to an extent they would feel uncomfortable with if Putin were to decree "right, no more elections, no more constitution, I'll just rule for life". If you're really pressed and have to admit you find the evidence convincing, it only really demonstrates vote totals being manipulated by up to 1%. A tiny amount of the margin of victory and comparable to the levels of election fraud in large democracies like India or the US.

This kind of plausible deniability is what international relations is built on, and the bigger a power you are, the less plausible your stories have to be. Russian troops fight in the Ukraine while on vacation. China needs airfields in the Spratly Islands to support local fishermen. Guantanamo Bay is run in accordance with the Geneva Convention and definitely no one gets tortured there.

“Election fraud”, “electoral fraud”, are all far better for many reasons.

If you must refer to the other concept, “voter impersonation fraud” is the appropriate term.

[1] https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=voter+fraud&ye...