8 ms·
Integer percentages as fingerprints of electoral falsification
- amerine 10y agoNice work. It's interesting they used Russia as the source of election results data. Did I miss an exlaination of their data selection criteria in the paper?
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- conistonwater 10y ago> We used election data from three countries besides Russia: 2011 general election in Spain, 2010 presidential election in Poland (1st round), and 2009 federal election in Germany (Zweitstimmen, i.e. party votes). These three elections were chosen because the data are publicly available down to the single polling station level, and because the number and size of polling stations are comparable to those in Russia I guess this means they found the data first, then decided to try to analyze it and compare it with similar data elsewhere. It's probably not their work-related research (http://www.fchampalimaud.org/en/the-foundation/mission/ http://www.fchampalimaud.org/en/the-foundation/mission/).
- amooeba 10y agoWell, I can give you the explanation: all of the authors are Russian.
- JelteF 10y agoIt would be very interesting to see this method used for other elections to see what unexpected results can be found. Although still interesting, it is not a huge surprise that there has been large vote fraud in Russia.
- trhway 10y ago>it is not a huge surprise that there has been large vote fraud in Russia Russian elections for statistics have become like "Lena" for image processing. Typical "camel-double-hump-Gauss" of Russian elections - polling stations without observers at Fig 2. at http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3545790/pdf/pnas.201206770.pdf http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3545790/pdf/pnas... ("United Russia" is the Putin's party).
- jrgirvan 10y agoShould try it on the USA election results...
- blueintegral 10y agoI thought this would just be an application of Benford's law, but they note in the beginning that using Benford's law doesn't work for elections (citing this paper: http://www.vote.caltech.edu/sites/default/files/benford_pdf_4b97cc5b5b.pdf http://www.vote.caltech.edu/sites/default/files/benford_pdf_...) Does anyone know why Benford's law doesn't work here but does work for other made up numbers in applications like accounting?
- e2e8 10y agoBenford's law best applies to data that spans multiple orders of magnitude.
- TeMPOraL 10y agoIsn't it that Benford's law applies when parts of data are being multiplied by other parts (like in most things in real world)? I.e. two uniform distributions multiplied together give a non-uniform distribution?
- sampo 10y agoFor Benford's law to apply, the numbers (the non-fabricated numbers) need to be coming from a source/distribution covering several orders of magnitude. The fabricated voting percentages are limited to between 0 and 100.
- moptar 10y agoHuh? You can have many orders of magnitude between 0 and 100%. 0.0001 is 4 orders of magnitude smaller than 1.
- empath75 10y agoRaw vote totals then?
- oceliker 10y agoWe ran a test for one of the problem sets in a course I was TAing. Raw vote counts did follow Benford's law in 2000 US presidential elections. We did not portray it as a tool to detect or disprove fraud, however.
- vinchuco 10y agoIs there a field that studies inconsistencies of this type? Recently on HN there was a related test (the Grim test) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11787560 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11787560
- Jerry2 10y agoAbsolutely fascinating research! I wonder if someone has some free time to run the models on several recent elections that were filled with fraud. I'm interested in: Austrian presidential elections [0], Turkish elections [1] and Democratic party primaries [2][3]. Each of them was analyzed for voting fraud and fraud was found in each of them (some were full of massive vote fraud like Turkish elections). PS: What's with all the downvotes? Is the evidence of massive voter fraud in the West so unsettling that you have to downvote me? [0] >Austria presidential poll result overturned http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-36681475 http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-36681475 [1] >Turkey Elections Massive Vote Fraud https://erikmeyersson.com/2015/11/04/digit-tests-and-the-peculiar-election-dynamics-of-turkeys-november-elections/ https://erikmeyersson.com/2015/11/04/digit-tests-and-the-pec... [2] >Hillary Clinton Favored By Election Fraud In Democratic Primaries http://www.inquisitr.com/3127046/hillary-clinton-favored-by-election-fraud-in-democratic-primaries-federal-lawsuit-filed-against-officials-to-protect-california-primaries/ http://www.inquisitr.com/3127046/hillary-clinton-favored-by-... [3] >Election Fraud Watch 2016 (J: awesome blog that tracks election fraud in primaries) https://electionfraud2016.wordpress.com/ https://electionfraud2016.wordpress.com/
- tripzilch 10y ago> Is the evidence of massive voter fraud in the West so unsettling that you have to downvote me? Not downvoting you. But if fraud turns out to be the case, I'm going to be unsettled as hell. It should be unsettling if you live and/or care about democracy in the West, obviously. I doubt we disagree about this though :) But even if no fraud is suspected or if it finds nothing, this is data science. Unlike say medicine or food science, there's no shortage of data (in theory). So if there's a country that we can reasonably be sure about their democracy is entirely above the table[0], throw it into the test and use that to calibrate the others. One problem I believe is that there is no such thing as "the test" :-) This research was done based in a particular system of elections--if you look beyond your own democratic system (or the way you've learned in school how it's supposed to work), you'll know how insanely different they all are. The fact that we actually use a single word "democracy" to describe them all is pretty crazy, now that I think about it. Both the numbers themselves (what aggregate counts are available) and the specific way of fraud suspected (which you kind of need for a statistical hypothesis) depend heavily on the democratic system involved. For instance that messy thing with the US elections a while back, second term of Bush IIRC, whether there was fraud or not, it was fought over a couple of hundreds of votes in one district or county, was it not? To disappear or push a few hundred votes one way or another requires a different type of fraud, and therefore statistical testing, than say, the type of fraud that makes a whole country of several hundred million almost always divide their votes between two options so close to 50/50 that a few hundred votes can swing the outcome in the first place. And that's just one country. So much different creative ways to mess up whatever is locally deemed to constitute democracy, you probably need at least an equal amount of different creative ways to statistically test whether they're fraudulent or not. [0] come to think of it, maybe there is a shortage of data ...
- jcalvinowens 10y agoThis is fascinating. I'm tempted to argue the improbably-round numbers might be due to lazily counting/sampling the ballots rather than actual malicious fraud... but I guess sloppily running the election still constitutes fraud in some sense.
- rcthompson 10y agoOr sloppy/lazy counting because they already know the predetermined outcome.
- Piskvorrr 10y agoImprobable. Sharing a pre-determined result with Joe Random Votecounters * number of voting stations = near certainty of someone leaking that, and a field day for the media. So, while theoretically possible, realistically summed up by "three men can hold a secret, if one of them is dead." (And specifically here, if I were a conspirator going for a predetermined result, I would want a somewhat close result, yes - but not an almost-tie as seen here. Something like 55:45 or somesuch, not a "every single vote matters" scenario, where a few thousand votes could swing the outcome)
- rcthompson 10y agoI think it would be more of an "open secret" pattern: e.g. no one explicitly orders people to make sure the ruling party always wins, but everyone knows someone who knows someone who was punished for reporting the actual count instead of a rigged count.
- Piskvorrr 10y agoWhat you are describing is not an "open secret," that's a "conspiracy theory."
- darkerside 10y agoThis is likely true and does not indicate fraud. The majority of precincts overwhelmingly favor one candidate, as do many states.
- lovemenot 10y agoOn reading just the abstract, there does not appear to be any control in this experiment. I'd have expected them to mention inclusion of election results known with certainty to not be fraudulent. Likewise, I'd expect there to be proof of fraud by other reliable means in order to validate this method. It is not enough for them to just assert that there can be no other explanation for this data, so these were fraudulent results, so our method must be working. Absent a control, the strong conclusion that fraud can be detected this way seems unsupported.
- conistonwater 10y agoThey include Poland, Germany, and Spain, see page 10, Fig. 3 and the discussion next to it. They also say the elections prior to 2004 have no such anomaly.
- lvs 10y agoI would suggest looking at the paper in more detail before saying it's uncontrolled. I found the control just by skimming the figures.
- lovemenot 10y agoI would do so, but the site prevents access to non-subscribers. Would you kindly tell me the method they used to independently prove fraud in some of the analysed data.
- ams6110 10y agoI had no trouble accessing the paper using the PDF link on the page (https://arxiv.org/pdf/1410.6059v4.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/1410.6059v4.pdf)
- lovemenot 10y agoThanks for the link to PDF. The "This URL" link takes you to a page that asks for a login. Having now read the article, I stand by my original point. There seems to be no verification that the proposed method does indeed identify (in some cases) cases of elections that were independently known, as a point of fact, to have been fraudulent. They seem to be claiming two things, but you cannot have it both ways : a) This method can identify fraudulent elections and we proved it by analysing elections in Russia b) These elections in Russia that we analysed using this method were fraudulent - as proved by the method. I would expect to see a control that takes data from elections that were already known to be fraudulent. e.g. by confession, video evidence or some other reliable means to show that the effect was observable in some of those demonstrably fraudulent elections.
- Artlav 10y agoIt's kinda sad to see our elections to be used as reference for falsification detection research... This isn't exactly new, such analysis was done as early as 2011, i.e. http://lleo.me/dnevnik/2011/12/07_gauss.html http://lleo.me/dnevnik/2011/12/07_gauss.html Although, they were more focused on the peculiar distribution, than on integer spikes.
- amooeba 10y agoThe figure that is reproduced and discussed in that lleo.me blog post was made by one of the authors of the paper that is being discussed here. It's just took us from the end of 2011 until early 2016 to actually get the whole thing published.
- euske 10y agoThis thread just reminded me of this quote: "If you tell the truth, you don't have to remember anything." - Mark Twain
- zyxzevn 10y agoWhy Electronic Voting is a BAD Idea - Computerphile https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w3_0x6oaDmI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w3_0x6oaDmI
- ChicagoBoy11 10y agoThis is brilliant. I wonder how the authors got the initial motivation to do the study -- seems like quite a bit of work to find a very specific statistical anomaly; doubt they went into it blindly not really knowing there was something to find...
- int_19h 10y agoIn 2014, there was a lot of attention drawn in Russia and Ukraine to votes in Crimea and Donbass (the "independence referendums", and elections of local leaders). The latter two votes, in particular, had nice exact percentages, which drew attention of people familiar with statistics almost immediately, and were heavily discussed in LJ.
- amooeba 10y agoThe study that is being discussed here was essentially done in the end of 2011 and early 2012, mostly triggered by the results of the 2011 legislative election (heavily discussed in LJ as well; in fact, this study itself was mostly developed in LJ). The election results in Crimea and Donbass do contain some funny patterns and are most likely largely made up, but no information is available on the polling station level so there is little to analyze statistically.
- int_19h 10y agoGood to know, thanks! Regarding this: >> no information is available on the polling station level so there is little to analyze statistically. What they did was look at the percentages and exact vote counts for each choice, and noticed that they match down to one vote (i.e. if you take the percentage, multiply by total population, and round, you'll get the vote count). For example, in referendum in Lugansk, the official stats are as follows: 1,349,360 valid bulletins 1,298,084 (96.2%) voted yes Normally, the percentage is a number with a lot of digits after the decimal point, which is then rounded for presentation purposes. But here, if you take 96.2% and multiply it by 1,349,360, you get 1,298,084.32. In other words, it's actually accurate to 4 digits after decimal point, three of which happen to be zeroes (96.2000%). Of course, it could be just a very unlikely (< 1/1000) coincidence that the number of "yes" votes just happened to fit exactly into three digits of precision. But a more reasonable explanation is that someone started with the percentage that they wanted to get, and then computed the requisite number of bulletins from that. Said explanation becomes even more reasonable when you take the reported numbers for turnout, and realize that the same relation holds there. Specifically: 1,807,739 eligible voters 1,359,419 voted (75.2%) 1,807,739 х 75.2% = 1,359,419.73 Oh look, another perfect percentage (75.2000%).