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  • #16
    Siell, tll, kaikkialla: Russian legislative elections 2011 - statistical evidence of vote fraud.

    lauantai, 10. joulukuuta 2011
    Russian legislative elections 2011 - statistical evidence of vote fraud.
    You probably have heard about alleged vote fraud in the Russian legislative election 2011. You might even have seen videos about cases of vote rigging. The ruling party dismisses allegations, because even if some of the cases may have been proven, there are too few of these cases to jeopardize the legitimacy of the whole election. Some of the opposition disagrees with this and is taking it to the streets. There were over 95000 polling stations in the election and of course election observers were not present in all of them. So few Russian citizens wondered if there would be some statistical support to the claims of systematic vote rigging. I have gathered information from three different Russian blog-posts that present such statistics. There are thousands of different reasons that can slightly alter the vote turnout at any given polling station. Some of these reasons affect the turnout positively, some of them negatively, but since the reasons are mainly random it is extremely unlikely that the turnout of a certain polling station differs a great deal from the average turnout of the elections. Usually when you plot the polling station by their turnout percentage you get a Normal distribution . Here's a picture:



    the above picture the X-axis shows vote turnout and the Y-axis shows amount of polling stations. From left to right the four curves represent Mexican legislative election 2009, second round of Polish presidential election in 2010, Bulgarian legislative election in 2009 and Swedish legislative election in 2010. Tendency towards a normal distribution is obvious. Now let's take a look if Russian elections in 2011 follow the same logic:



    ou can see the normal distribution all the way to the 55% turnout. Then something strange happens. For some reason turnout significantly larger than the mean is far more likely than turnout significantly lower than the mean. This cannot be explained by existence of very small polling stations since the results are weighted. So maybe it's just one of those Russian things like excessive alcohol consumption. Let's take a look at the previous four election in Russia



    The pale brown curve is for the 2003 legislative election, the dark brown curve is for the 2007 legislative election, the light blue curve is for the 2004 presidential election and the dark blue curve is for the 2008 presidential election. Once again we observe normal distribution until the 55% turnout mark. But take a look at those spikes at 70%, 75%, 80%, 85%, 90% and 98%! There are two ways to explain this. First explanation is that for some unknown reason voters of large amount of polling stations coordinate their actions by setting a target turnout. The second explanation is that there is systematic vote fraud at some of the polling station with specific target amount of votes. Take for example the 98% spikes in the curves. Imagine that you are committing a vote fraud. You don't want to get caught and 100% turnout is easily proven false as soon as one of the citizens of the area tells that he didn't vote since he was out of town. So, since you live in Russia and not North Korea, you make the turnout 98%. Take for example the 2011 legislative election in Chechnya: the turnout is 93.31% and 99.48% of votes go to United Russia party. One could use the argument that the even percentage spikes are there because of very small polling stations. In a polling station with 20 voters all of the possible turnout outcomes end with 5 or 0. But there are not that many small polling stations, and even if there were, you would expect the similar spikes at polling stations with low turnout.



    So, now that we concluded that there is something fishy about Russian election, the next question is who benefits from this? The opposition blames the United Russia party, which holds the majority of lower and higher house parliament, as well as the presidential seat. United Russia denies vote fraud. Accusing opposition of vote rigging would take away the legitimacy of the election and if you're the one in power you don't want to do that. One might ask why would United Russia, Putin or Medvedev resort to vote fraud despite the fact that they are truly popular in Russia and would get a majority or close to a majority of parliament seats/votes even without the fraud. That is a fair question, but politics is a game that has wide array of possible outcomes, not just win or lose. It is a completely different thing to do what you want when you can claim a mandate of 80% of the people instead of just half. But is there evidence that the United Russia is benefiting from vote fraud? Imagine that you are going to a polling station and that you already know who are you going to vote. At the door to the polling station you find out that the turnout there is already over 40%/60%/80%. Does that influence your vote? Probably not. Let's take a look the next picture.



    Picture on the left is about Russian legislative election 2007, the second picture is from Moscow city parliament election in 2009. Every dot represents the amount of votes that a party had at a polling station. The X-axis is for turnout of the polling station and the Y-axis is for the percentage of votes a party had at that station. Different colors represent different parties. Take a guess what party the purple dots represents. That's right, United Russia. Now lets take a look at the 2011 election results from Moscow:



    The Y-axis is for the amount of polling stations, the X-axis is the vote percentage. We see curves for five different parties, four of them are close to the normal distribution curves and one of them belongs to the United Russia. You see two spikes: one at 30% which is what surveys predicted for United Russia and one at 50-55% which is what was probably United Russia's own target. Now the vote result in the city of Magnitogorsk:



    This is a curve of United Russia votes in Magnitogorsk, a South Russia city with a population of 400000. I guess the people there are really divided or something. And then there's the last picture about the correlation between the vote turnout and the vote percentage of United Russia:



    conclusion, I would say that the vote fraud was definitely there, but it's to early to tell how much it affected the result. United Russia would probably have been the biggest party even without the fraud. But that's not the point. The point is that a rigged election does not give legitimacy to the new Duma. Even without the vote fraud there's still the issue of not allowing all opposition parties to take part in the elections and the lack of freedom of press. I, as a citizen of Russia voted in these elections at a Russian embassy in Helsinki. Yabloko party received 25% of the votes here, 22 points more than in Russian regions while United Russia got less than 20%. Is it because people with more "western" views are more likely to migrate from Russia or because of the free press here? That is a topic for a whole other discussion.

    References: Lenta.ru:
    Выбирать неприходится - Журнал Esquire
    eugenyboger:
    eugenyboger:

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    • #17
      "Vlad the Impaler" eats " The Puppet Master"....

      Reuters) - The architect of Vladimir Putin's tightly controlled political system became one of its most senior victims on Tuesday when he was shunted out of the Kremlin in the wake of the biggest opposition protests of Putin's 12-year rule.

      The sacrifice of Vladislav Surkov, branded the Kremlin's 'puppet master' by enemies and friends alike, is also a rare admission of failure for Russia's 'alpha dog' leader: Surkov's system was Putin's system.

      With irony worthy of Surkov's cynical novels, the Kremlin's 47-year-old political mastermind was shown grinning on state television when told by President Dmitry Medvedev that he would oversee modernization as a deputy prime minister.

      When asked why he was leaving the Kremlin, Surkov deliberately misquoted a slogan from the French Revolution, saying: "Stabilization is eating up its children."

      Almost in passing, Surkov told Interfax news agency he would not be running domestic politics after nearly 13 years doing exactly that from the corridors of the Kremlin.

      Why? "I am too notorious for the brave new world."

      His post will be taken by Putin's chief of staff and Surkov's arch enemy, Vyacheslav Volodin, a wealthy former lawyer who hails from Putin's ruling United Russia party. Anton Vaino, a 39-year-old former diplomat, becomes Putin's chief of staff.

      By ejecting Surkov from the Kremlin just two months before the presidential election, Putin is betting that he can neutralize some of the anger against his rule by projecting the impression of a brave new world of political reform.

      "What happened today is nothing more than shuffling people from one office into another," Mikhail Prokhorov, Russia's third richest man who demanded Surkov be sacked in September, said through a spokesman. "Little will change from these shifts."

      Though Surkov's exit may not usher in a vast political change, it is the end of an era for one of Putin's most powerful aides. And at Putin's court, personalities count for everything.

      PUTIN'S ARTIST

      Described as Russia's answer to France's Cardinal Richelieu or a modern-day Machiavelli, Surkov was one of the creators of the system Putin crafted since he rose to power in 1999.

      To admirers, "Slava" Surkov is the most flamboyant mind in Putin's court: a writer of fiction who recited poets such as Allen Ginsberg but also strong enough to hold his own against the KGB spies and oligarchs in the infighting of the Kremlin.

      To enemies, Surkov is a dangerous artist who used his brains to expand Putin's power and whose intellectual snobbery made Russian citizens beads in a grand political experiment called "Vladimir Putin."

      Fond of black ties and sometimes unshaven, Surkov survived many turf wars but he could not survive the biggest protests of Putin's rule or Putin's need to find someone to blame for them.

      As the manager of United Russia, the Kremlin's point man on elections and ultimately the day-to-day manager of Putin's political system, Surkov bore direct responsibility for the protests which have pitted Russia's urban youth against Putin.

      He did not answer requests for comment.

      Brought into the Kremlin under Boris Yeltsin in 1999 to serve as an aide to then chief of staff Alexander Voloshin, Surkov helped ease the handover of power to Putin.

      He then worked with Putin and then President Medvedev to consolidate power, repeatedly using the specter of the chaotic 1990s to warn against swift change.

      PUTIN'S SYSTEM

      In practice, Surkov's rule meant centralizing power in Putin's hands: Surkov moved regional decision-making to the Kremlin, struck down any attempt at autonomy and directed party politics.

      Such was his power that Russia's top party officials, journalists and cultural leaders would visit him in the Kremlin for 'direction' on how to present events to the public.

      "He is considered one of the architects of the system," Putin's former finance minister, Alexei Kudrin, told Kommersant FM radio.

      "Now this system is being revised. New organizers are needed with different views on the political system," said Kudrin, who has offered to lead dialogue between the opposition and the authorities.

      Signs of trouble for Surkov appeared in May when Volodin -the man who eventually took his job - helped Putin create a new movement, or popular front, that would compete with the United Russia party for Putin's patronage.

      Volodin, a dollar millionaire fond of ducking reporters questions with irony or personal needling, presented thereporters' popular front to Putin as a way to revive the ruling party.

      Volodin's stock rose after securing 65 percent of the vote for Putin's party in Saratov, a region where he was born.

      Then in September, the main scriptwriter of Russian politics became the focus of an intriguing unscripted conflict with Prokhorov - the whizz kid of Russian finance - over the fate of a minor opposition party which was crippled by the Kremlin.

      "There is a puppet master in this country who long ago privatized the political system and has for a long time misinformed the leadership of the country," Prokhorov, whose fortune Forbes put at $18 billion, said at the time.

      "His name is Vladislav Yuryevich Surkov," said Prokhorov, who demanded Putin sack Surkov. Putin had to personally calm down the two sides in the row, two sources said.

      But after mass protests in major Russian cities against the parliamentary election and against Putin himself, Surkov's analysis differed to that of his boss.

      Putin has dismissed the protesters as chattering monkeys or a motley crew of leaderless opponents bent on sowing chaos, but Surkov gave a more refined view: he said they were among the best people in Russian society.

      "You cannot simply swipe away their opinions in an arrogant way," said Surkov, who will now have to move his portrait of Argentine-born revolutionary Che Guevara from his Kremlin office.

      Putin ejects Kremlin puppet master after protests | Reuters

      One way ticket to Siberia for snow shoveling anyone?:whome:

      And the beat gos on!:Dancing-Banana:
      Last edited by Dreadnought; 28 Dec 11,, 02:58.
      Fortitude.....The strength to persist...The courage to endure.

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      • #18
        Kremlin's photo-doctoring backfires big time.

        LONDON – Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, and those who work for him, seem determined to turn a relatively unknown, 30-something protester into a larger-than-life political rival.

        It all began on a cold, December 4 afternoon, when Alexei Navalny stood up among a small crowd in Moscow and blasted Putin's United Russia party as one of “crooks and thieves” who had just stolen the parliamentary elections. The Kremlin put him in jail for two weeks. The tactic was obvious: keeping Navalny locked up would hinder his ability to organize a massive anti-Putin demonstration on December 24.

        Instead, the move backfired and ended up boosting Navalny's profile – and street cred – at a time when the splintered opposition was hungry for a new leader.

        By Dec. 24 he was out of prison and had become the face of the opposition. His rant in the bitter cold that day inspired more than 100,000 people in the street to “take back the election – by force if necessary” from those who had stolen it.

        But catapulting Navalny into instant celebrity wasn't good enough for the over-anxious Kremlinites. Now they've made him the face of their own absurdity as well.

        Open up last Saturday's edition of Arguments & Facts, a popular national daily, and you'll find a photo of a beaming Navalny standing next to Putin's arch enemy, the oligarch-in-exile Boris Berezovsky, himself sporting a Cheshire cat smile.

        A screen grab from the Guardian shows the original photo of Alexei Navalny with Prokhorov on the top left, the doctored one with Berezovsky and some other fakes that have been circulated online.

        The caption reads: “Navalny has never hidden that Boris Berezovsky gives him money for the struggle with Putin.”

        Well, it took Navalny and his corral of fellow bloggers a few nano-seconds to work out that the photo had been doctored.

        In the actual photo, Navalny is standing next to another, Putin-friendly oligarch, Mikhail Prokhorov, the owner of the New Jersey Nets and a candidate for Russia's presidency.

        But standing next to Prokhorov is seen as benign because he's neither considered an agitator nor a serious threat to the Kremlin.

        Instead of just pointing out the fakery, Navalny’s supporters took things to the next level – by beaming photos across the blogosphere of him standing next to the likes of Arnold Schwarzenegger, a space alien, Putin and other action men.

        Rich history of air-brushing
        The air-brushing of photos for propaganda reasons is an old Soviet art. Joseph Stalin routinely had friends and allies erased from photos taken with him when they became his enemies (often after he’d had them killed, as in the famous case of Nikolai Yezhov, the leader of the NKVD, precursor of the KGB, in the 1920s.)

        My personal faking favorite is the iconic shot of several Soviet soldiers holding up the hammer-sickle-flag above the German Reichstag building, marking the effective end of the war in Europe in 1945. If you look closely you'll see that the soldier supporting the flag-bearer is wearing a watch on his left arm. In the original, however, he has watches on both arms – suggesting that he might have looted them. The Russian magazine Ogonok removed the second watch just before publication.

        Of course, the practice is not restricted to Russia. Ever since photographs became a means by which world leaders defined themselves to their public, photos of Hitler, Mussolini, Mao Tse-tung, and going back in time, Grant, Sherman and, yes, even Abraham Lincoln, were doctored in order to enhance their image. .

        But seldom has a manipulated photo backfired with the same concussive effect that Navalny's has.

        One can even imagine the taciturn Putin, an ex-KGB agent, letting out an unforced guffaw as he scans Navalny's blog and finds the latest “photo-toad” (an English translation of the Russian slang for a doctored photo) of Navalny standing next to Bender, the robot from the comic strip Futurama.

        Putin's camp had no doubt hoped to turn Navalny into an enemy of Russia's people. Instead, the Kremlin itself has become a lightning rod for Russians' scorn and mockery, and Navalny has seen himself launched into the stratosphere of a Marvel Comics hero, without even having to lift a megaphone.

        In the lead-up to the March presidential election, Putin – still considered a shoo-in to win it all – may yet turn out to be his own worst propagandist.

        Jim Maceda is an NBC news correspondent based in London who has covered Russia and the Soviet Union since the 1980s.

        World Blog - Kremlin's photo-doctoring backfires big time
        Fortitude.....The strength to persist...The courage to endure.

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        • #19
          russkaya propaganda, ne imjushi analogov v mire :)

          /russian propaganda, without analogue in the world/

          If i only was so smart yesterday as my wife is today

          Minding your own biz is great virtue, but situation awareness saves lives - Dok

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          • #20
            FInland has gotten >50 000 of those!

            Originally posted by NUS View Post
            Such amount is an obvious nonsense for anyone with minimal traces of brainpower and critical thinking.

            For those, who dont have any:

            http://www.gks.ru/free_doc/new_site/...emo/demo42.htm

            Year : amount
            1997 : 232987
            1998 : 213377
            1999 : 214963
            2000 : 145720
            2001 : 121166
            2002 : 106685
            2003 : 94018
            2004 : 79795
            2005 : 69798
            2006 : 54061
            2007 : 47013
            2008 : 39508

            Half of those people have moved to neighboring countries. Conditions there can hardly be called much better then in Russia.

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            • #21
              Half of those people have moved to neighboring countries. Conditions there can hardly be called much better then in Russia.


              Maybe better rulers.;)
              Fortitude.....The strength to persist...The courage to endure.

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              • #22
                what this?
                cach giam beo

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