Graph Shows Fraud in Russian Elections 406
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."
Why? (Score:5, Insightful)
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A: Because that doesn't support my preconceptions. Fuck off, Troll!
Deadly Power Games in the Kremlin (Score:5, Informative)
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 [economist.com] 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 [wsj.com] 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?
Re:Why? (Score:4, Funny)
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Re:Why? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Why? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Why? (Score:5, Interesting)
Realistically, United Russia was going to win about %50 in "unrigged" elections. This is a simple majority, sufficient to pass regular laws. However, Putin needs constitutional majority (which is defined as 2/3 of the votes) to be able to pass constitutional amendments and various important laws related to status of Russia in union such as union with Belorussia. Now 2/3 for those advanced math majors is about %66
Re:Why? (Score:5, Insightful)
Lesse - last I heard, they were still fighting the Chechen rebels, nyet?
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Oh come on. This as good as "the iraq war is over"
Re:Why? (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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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 3
I heard they forced people in hospitals to vote (Score:2, Interesting)
Troll? (Score:2, Interesting)
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Yep, that is true (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Whoopsie! (Score:5, Funny)
And apparently neither has the person who wrote the summary.
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I guess back in his KGB days, Vladimir spent enough time in Germany that he's fluent and doesn't even need subtitles on German TV.
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and you could clearly hear, how even then he tried to cover his accent, while his use of the german language was overall very good.
Cover up the accent... (Score:4, Interesting)
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""
Re:Whoopsie! (Score:5, Funny)
In soviet Russia (Score:5, Funny)
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You don't need brains to be a dictator (Score:5, Insightful)
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 (Score:5, Funny)
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I'll take "fucks interns" over "fucks the constitution" any day.
Re:You don't need brains to be a dictator (Score:4, Funny)
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Well what did you expect? (Score:5, Interesting)
Not surprising (Score:2, Interesting)
For a sec, I thought I saw... (Score:2)
But, nyet, nyet...
(Spasibo, & dasvidanya, Comrade...)
"rigged Elections" (Score:4, Funny)
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Re:"rigged Elections" (Score:5, Informative)
Re:"rigged Elections" (Score:4, Insightful)
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Provided you already are in power.
Re:"rigged Elections" (Score:4, Interesting)
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It only makes "a pretty convincing case" if you're a member of the reality based community.
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_presidential_election,_1876#Electoral_disputes [wikipedia.org]
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No, Russia is going towards fascist dictatorship via right-wing populism. And the US is heading in the same direction (although it's not as far along) because morons like you think that right-wing populism is just fine and dandy.
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No, I think he was confused by the fact that it resembles the revolutionary right-ism in the United States so much that it is difficult to distinguish them.
The political landscape is a sphere, go far enough in ANY direction (right or left, progressive or conservative) from freedom at the "top" and you always eventually get to dictatorship, down at the bottom.
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I don't know about the future, but judging by the past - twenty years ago we had Bush, now we have Bush (and not the good kind..) - I don't see how anything would change.
Compare 2004 Ohio and 2000 Florida returns (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Compare 2004 Ohio and 2000 Florida returns (Score:4, Funny)
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Not quite what you're after, but how about Canada, 2006 [minns.ca]?
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Rigged or not, Putin's party would still win. (Score:2, Interesting)
I didn't realize the extent of this un
Putin lifted millions from poverty (Score:3, Interesting)
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
so did Hitler (Score:2, Insightful)
And make no mistake about it: every nation is always at risk for those kinds of people.
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T
So he did (Score:3, Informative)
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 pow
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Any news agency will tell you negative news sells better.
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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.
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It is not a coincidence that countries rich in natural resources tend to have the least democratic governments.
Re:Rigged or not, Putin's party would still win. (Score:5, Informative)
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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
Re:Rigged or not, Putin's party would still win. (Score:4, Informative)
What happened to the great Russian Mathematicians? (Score:3, Funny)
Re:What happened to the great Russian Mathematicia (Score:5, Funny)
God, I can't tell you how long I've been waiting to use that
Detailed tests? (Score:5, Interesting)
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? (Score:5, Informative)
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.)
Re:Detailed tests? (Score:4, Informative)
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.
The most interesting question: WHY? (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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He wanted to be 100% sure that Putins party and his favoured
others (Schirinowski) parties get
1.) a clear +66 percent in the Duma (russian parliament)
2.) Putin can show this result like a trophy that the russians fully trust him
( they entiteled him to be a leader )
if you recall his announcement for his past presidential time, he don't want to become
a Prime Minister, but he wants to stay as an influential adviser for
Re:The most interesting question: WHY? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:The most interesting question: WHY? (Score:4, Informative)
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According to the state run media, you mean.
What were their actual approval ratings?
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Ok, maybe they could have got another 1-2% each without voting fraud. But it's still pitifully small.
the mighty graph (Score:3, Funny)
The nice thing (Score:2, Insightful)
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.
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The stats were all done using swivel (probably after you commented admittedly), not livejoural, LJ is just the site he posted them.
In Non-Soviet Russia... (Score:2)
Those who count the votes... (Score:5, Insightful)
Explanation (Score:3, Interesting)
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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.).
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What I would like to see is a comparison of actual voting results by district vs. anonymous non-biased polling numbers from before the election. Unfortunately, I doubt such numbers exist.
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In the best traditions of Edward Tufte? Hardly. (Score:5, Funny)
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Coverage in the Economist (Score:3, Informative)
http://economist.com/world/europe/displaystory.cfm?story_id=10217312 [economist.com]
The Russians should be commended (Score:5, Funny)
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Many Elections are rigged in Favor of Two Parties (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Edit Wikipedia (Score:5, Funny)
An old soviet age joke comes back to life (Score:3, Funny)
Putin does not need to rig any election. (Score:2, Insightful)
My firsthand experience (Score:4, Informative)
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.
Re:Where did the data come from? (Score:5, Insightful)
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/ [cikrf.ru] and the present election results will be eventually posted at http://www.cikrf.ru/elect_duma/npa/index.jsp [cikrf.ru]. This is in Russian however, so I don't know how useful that would be..
Re:Uh huh. (Score:5, Informative)
You might look at some of Steven F. Freeman's papers [appliedresearch.us], like this one: Polling Bias or Corrupted Count? [appliedresearch.us] (pdf file).
Nope. Just the good old US corporate media. "Nothing to see here, just a bunch of conspiracy nuts on the internet"
Yes, very similar things happended in 2004 (Score:4, Interesting)
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. [verifiedvo...dation.org] These sorts of ridiculous "errors" could be seen when searching the online results at the time.
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