More on Russian Elections Fraud
Filed under: Russia
Last month, we reported on an effort by two bloggers to document the extent of the Kremlin's manipulation of Russia's "elections" using statistical evidence.
Now, noted Russian scholar Andrei Illarionov has provided more such evidence, and given a lengthy interview to Echo of Moscow radio detailing his findings, which he has published as part of a PowerPoint presentation (in Russian language) that also deals with economic issues and asks whether Russia is headed for an "economic catastrophe." We've already published an original translation of the executive summary of Illarionov's analysis, and after the jump provide some further details from his findings.
The following series of three graphs prove beyond any reasonable doubt that massive electoral fraud took place in the 2004 and 2008 presidential elections in Russia, to the exclusive benefit of Putin an Medvedev. The source of the data in all cases was the Russian Central Election Commission itself.
Title: "Distribution of Voter Turnout for Presidential Elections in the Russian Federation in 1991-2008, All Regions (85)."Vertical axis: Number of Regions (reporting this percentage turnout)
Horizontal axis: Voter Turnout (%)
From the graph above we see that the turnout rates for elections from 1991-2000 were distributed in essentially normal, bell-shaped curves - as one would expect if there was little/no/very uniform manipulation of "voter turnout" (which may include stuffing of ballot boxes and/or forcing/bribing people to vote). Very mild distortions are visible on the right side of the curves (high turnout rates) in second round in 1996 and the only round in 2000, but in 2004 and 2008, we suddenly see enormous distortions from the normal bell shape, becoming utterly ludicrous in 2008, when an actual bi-modal distribution appears, with one hump at the 95% turnout rate! This shows that manipulation of "turnout" became at the very least much less uniform in those years.
So the natural next question is: Who's responsible? Was the manipulation of voter turnout something that all parties engaged in, benefiting all the candidates equally, or did some benefit more than others? Two other sets of data presented by Illarionov answer that question definitively.
Title: "Voter Turnout and Support for the Candidates in the 2008 Presidential Election"Vertical (y) axis: Percentage of Votes From All Voters
Horizontal (x) axis: Voter Turnout (%)
Candidates (top to bottom): Medvedev, Zyuganov, Zhirinovsky, Bogdanov
Title: "Voter Turnout and Support for the Candidates in the 2004 Presidential Election"Vertical (y) axis: Percentage of Votes From All Voters
Horizontal (x) axis: Voter Turnout (%)
Candidates (top to bottom): Putin, Kharitonov, Glazev, Khakamada
As the above tables indicate, his data shows that in regions where voter turnout exceeded 50%, the extra turnout overwhelmingly benefited Medvedev (in 2008) and Putin (in 2004); and, most critically, the higher the "turnout," the greater the percentage of the total vote that went to these two candidates. To what degree did this "rule" hold? The statistical figure "R-squared" is a measure of this - the "goodness of fit" for the rule: a value of 1.0 indicates the rule holds absolutely (that is, the higher the "turnout," the more/less the candidate's total vote); a figure of 0 indicates there is no correlation. For both Medvedev and Putin, the "goodness of fit" for this rule was very high, about 90% - which any statistician will tell you makes the correlation "highly significant." For the other candidates, there was a slight downward trend (meaning the higher the “turnout”, the lower the total percentage of votes for them), and no statistically significant fit (that is, the percentage of the vote they tended to lose as turnout increased was not related to the amount by which turnout increased). This means that almost all the ballot box stuffing and/or other means of artificially increasing the turnout was done to the benefit Putin/Medvedev.
Title: "Index of Falsification of Elections in Russia, 1991-2008"Vertical Axis: "Falsification Index" (apparently the highest R-squared observed in regression analyses like those shown in the previous two graphs)
Horizontal Axis: Elections analyzed, starting with the Communist Party elections in the USSR in 1991, followed by all the Presidential and Parliamentary elections that followed, as well as the two Constitutional Referenda of April and December 1993.
Illarionov also presents a third data set, graphed above, which shows an enormous increase in the degree of falsification of elections beginning with the parliamentary elections of 1999. In recent years, the degree of falsification has exceeded even that seen in the final days of the Soviet Union. In July 1998, President Boris Yeltsin appointed Vladimir Putin as head of the FSB, successor agency to the KGB, and in August 1999 appointed him Acting Prime Minister. Also in 1999, according to Wikipedia, Putin, "while not formally associated with any party, pledged his support to the newly formed Unity Party, which won the second largest percentage of the popular vote (23.32%) in the December 1999 Duma elections, and in turn he was supported by it. Putin appeared to be ideally positioned to win the presidency in elections due the following summer."
Finally, Illarionov includes a great regression ("R-squared") analysis (shown above) of the Duma elections of December. He shows that falsification in those elections might actually have made a difference, since it gave Putin a constitutional majority, and it was even more blatant than in the presidential elections, with over 30% of the vote falsified in places where turnout exceeded 50%.
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