Date: Wed, 28 Dec 2011
Subject: Re: WSJ: Russia's Dubious Vote
From: Anatoly Karlin <alfatols@gmail.com>
I suspect that the WSJ's model probably resembles Shpilkin's (who blogs as podmoskovnik); at least, their fraud estimates are very similar. Both find that there were irregularities that contributed to about 15% extra votes in favor of United Russia, making the election clearly illegitimate.
According to my own list of other indicators and expert estimates (see http://www.sublimeoblivion.com/2011/12/27/fraud-estimates-russia-2011/), this is at the extreme range of estimates. The diametrically opposite viewpoint is that fraud was non-existent or minimal, but only the likes of Churov and Peskov believe that. Most estimates cluster around the 3%-10% range.
The fundamental problem with the Shpilkin approach, the most popular one, is that they they observe that a higher turnout means more votes for United Russia. They make a blanket assumption that all these votes are suspect, remove them, and voila! United Russia's plummets from 49% to its "honest" value of 34% or thereabouts, in the process discrediting not only the elections themselves but pretty much the entirety of Russian opinion polling and exit polling (the most comprehensive exit poll, FOM, had a 6% discrepancy with UR's real results). Now 6% is obviously bad but 15%-20% is something you're more likely to get in a place like Belarus.
What other Russian bloggers have pointed out is that a whole lot of other countries - Germany, the UK, Israel - have similar voting tendencies. There, more turnout means more votes for their conservative parties (Christian Democrats, Tories, Kadima, respectively). So since most readers would agree that those countries have clean elections, the "more turnout and more votes for one party MUST MEAN fraud fraud fraud!!!" thesis isn't exactly universally valid.
This linear relation between more turnout and more votes for United Russia further makes sense because, whereas a party like the Communists has a hard core of supporters who tend to turn out reliably (with proportional representation, their votes aren't "lost" even though the party has no real chance of winning), United Russia's electorate is much more apathetic, a "silent majority" according to economics blogger Alexander Zhuravlev. More turnout means it manages to mobilize more people to go out and vote; naturally, a greater turnout means more votes for the party of power. This is a constant in Russian politics that stretches back to the 1990's (recall the 1996 election when Yeltsin was appealing to Russians to go out and vote to forestall the Communist victory that would have resulted had they remained at home in large numbers).
So the methods that give a fraud level of 15%, generally speaking, rely on rather crude assumptions that don't stand up to critical examination.
This does not mean there was no fraud. I find Churov's arguments for zero fraud equally implausible, though I won't bother covering why as I assume most readers will agree anyway (those who want the details, here: http://www.sublimeoblivion.com/2011/12/26/measuring-churovs-beard/ ).
My extensive examination of the evidence leads me to suspect that the aggregate level of fraud in favor of United Russia was around 5%-7%. This evidence encompasses all the pre-elections polls (which ALL gave United Russia more than 50%); the most comprehensive exit poll, which gave a difference of 6%; the discrepancies between results from hand ballots and machine voting (6%-7%); the results of a Communist parallel count of election protocols from the last election in 2008 (5.4%); and statistical analyses by other experts.
But again, that's just my opinion. Feel free to trawl through the list of estimates I've assembled and make up your own mind. http://www.sublimeoblivion.com/2011/12/27/fraud-estimates-russia-2011/
Date: Wed, 28 Dec 2011
Subject: Re: WSJ: Russia's Dubious Vote
From: Anatoly Karlin <alfatols@gmail.com>
I suspect that the WSJ's model probably resembles Shpilkin's (who blogs as podmoskovnik); at least, their fraud estimates are very similar. Both find that there were irregularities that contributed to about 15% extra votes in favor of United Russia, making the election clearly illegitimate.
According to my own list of other indicators and expert estimates (see http://www.sublimeoblivion.com/2011/12/27/fraud-estimates-russia-2011/), this is at the extreme range of estimates. The diametrically opposite viewpoint is that fraud was non-existent or minimal, but only the likes of Churov and Peskov believe that. Most estimates cluster around the 3%-10% range.
The fundamental problem with the Shpilkin approach, the most popular one, is that they they observe that a higher turnout means more votes for United Russia. They make a blanket assumption that all these votes are suspect, remove them, and voila! United Russia's plummets from 49% to its "honest" value of 34% or thereabouts, in the process discrediting not only the elections themselves but pretty much the entirety of Russian opinion polling and exit polling (the most comprehensive exit poll, FOM, had a 6% discrepancy with UR's real results). Now 6% is obviously bad but 15%-20% is something you're more likely to get in a place like Belarus.
What other Russian bloggers have pointed out is that a whole lot of other countries - Germany, the UK, Israel - have similar voting tendencies. There, more turnout means more votes for their conservative parties (Christian Democrats, Tories, Kadima, respectively). So since most readers would agree that those countries have clean elections, the "more turnout and more votes for one party MUST MEAN fraud fraud fraud!!!" thesis isn't exactly universally valid.
This linear relation between more turnout and more votes for United Russia further makes sense because, whereas a party like the Communists has a hard core of supporters who tend to turn out reliably (with proportional representation, their votes aren't "lost" even though the party has no real chance of winning), United Russia's electorate is much more apathetic, a "silent majority" according to economics blogger Alexander Zhuravlev. More turnout means it manages to mobilize more people to go out and vote; naturally, a greater turnout means more votes for the party of power. This is a constant in Russian politics that stretches back to the 1990's (recall the 1996 election when Yeltsin was appealing to Russians to go out and vote to forestall the Communist victory that would have resulted had they remained at home in large numbers).
So the methods that give a fraud level of 15%, generally speaking, rely on rather crude assumptions that don't stand up to critical examination.
This does not mean there was no fraud. I find Churov's arguments for zero fraud equally implausible, though I won't bother covering why as I assume most readers will agree anyway (those who want the details, here: http://www.sublimeoblivion.com/2011/12/26/measuring-churovs-beard/ ).
My extensive examination of the evidence leads me to suspect that the aggregate level of fraud in favor of United Russia was around 5%-7%. This evidence encompasses all the pre-elections polls (which ALL gave United Russia more than 50%); the most comprehensive exit poll, which gave a difference of 6%; the discrepancies between results from hand ballots and machine voting (6%-7%); the results of a Communist parallel count of election protocols from the last election in 2008 (5.4%); and statistical analyses by other experts.
But again, that's just my opinion. Feel free to trawl through the list of estimates I've assembled and make up your own mind. http://www.sublimeoblivion.com/2011/12/27/fraud-estimates-russia-2011/