5 ms·

How do you know that, though? Are you a citizen of Russia? Because if you are not, I'm suspicious. I live in an undemocratic country but even then, we have a f

How do you know that, though? Are you a citizen of Russia? Because if you are not, I'm suspicious. I live in an undemocratic country but even then, we have a fairly good opposition and kind of a free media thanks to the journalists taking the risk of prison and social media so I was really surprised to find out there is no powerful opposition in my country, all of the media belongs to him and we citizens are just dumb people who wouldn't know our country better than outsiders. The thing is, a leader can't hold that much power. If he lost the election, s/he can play dirty, fight etc. but wouldn't be able to do as s/he pleases with the results. There is always a balance they need to be careful about and not everything is black and white.

notfromhere 7y ago
Voting irregularities are pretty standard in Russia, lots of international observers and reports have established it. Opposition candidates are regularly jailed, major protests and civil actions are suppressed, and if you really get under the Kremlin's skin, you find yourself assassinated or thrown out of a window. Putin's Russia is a very blatant authoritarian regime.
- m0zg 7y ago
  Not just Putin's. There was only one time in my lifetime when nobody knew who would win the election. That was the 1996 election which was largely won by Yeltsin by hiring a bunch of consultants from the US to run it (and I also suspect that his campaign was at least in part financed by the US as well - his opponent was Gennady Zyuganov, a communist). Other than that I don't recall any even somewhat democratic elections at all. Needless to say, there weren't any real elections in the USSR either. Nor under Czar before that. It's a long, established tradition.
  - orbital-decay 7y ago
    >largely won by Yeltsin by hiring a bunch of consultants from the US to run it You sure it wasn't due to other candidates giving up their ambitions to stop Zyuganov?
    - m0zg 7y ago
      Pretty sure. In the first round Zuyganov and Yeltsin were neck and neck. Zuyganov looked _very_ viable to most of the older voting population who had quite enough of the "wild 90's" and wanted to go back to the socialist certainty of how things were before Perestroika, at least to some extent, and Zuyganov promised exactly that. Or at least how they remembered how things were: people tend to forget the bad things first, this is called the "good old days syndrome". Russian presidents don't usually try to dance awkwardly on stage unless things are truly desperate: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cRysHHzLAmM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cRysHHzLAmM :-) The entirety of Russia's entertainment industry was paid huge amounts of cash, mostly under the table, to stage concerts in support of Yeltsin. Where that cash came from nobody knows to this day.
      - orbital-decay 7y ago
        >Russian presidents don't usually try to dance awkwardly on stage Probably not in the case of Yeltsin though, who willingly jumped from the CPSU Olympus once (which was probably the only relatively bright moment in his career) and was fairly eccentric otherwise, especially when drunk. I was one year short of the voting age back then, but I remember it very well. What you're saying is true, but you're only describing his "Vote or Lose" campaign. My impression was that he won mostly due to the support of the elites (aka oligarchs who owned the media) faced with the possibility of a communist president, not just because he paid the media. Also the support of other candidates, in particular he convinced Chernomyrdin and Nemtsov, fairly popular back then, to abstain from running for presidency in his favor, after they declared they would run for the office. Regarding the US consultants, I think his only foreign consultant was Tim Bell, who was British, IIRC he didn't design Yeltsin's Vote or Lose since his experience wasn't directly applicable in Russia, it was Malashenko who designed it.
        m0zg 7y ago
        ^ This is so wonderfully naive, I'm at a loss for words. https://www.jacobinmag.com/2017/03/russia-us-clinton-boris-yeltsin-elections-interference-trump/ https://www.jacobinmag.com/2017/03/russia-us-clinton-boris-y...
m0zg 7y ago
Yes I am, in fact, a citizen of Russia. I'm also a US citizen. I know this because there's been both video and statistical evidence, as well as numerous reports of electoral district vote counters simply falsifying final vote tallies, people being bused around to vote in multiple districts, etc, etc. Statistical evidence of vote count manipulation is actually pretty damning. If you calculate the distribution of vote count _percentages_ across all electoral districts, you will see that there are spikes around multiples of 5 and 10%. That means the vote for the "right" candidate was rounded up to an even number on a statistically significant number of them.
- ummonk 7y ago
  Don’t those spikes happen in small districts though, where you’re likely to have 1,2,4,5,10,or20 votes which would all guarantee a result with a multiple of 5 or 10%?
  - codedokode 7y ago
    I don't have those graphs with spikes at the moment, but there are more interesting ones. Here is an article in Russian with graphs [1]. This [2] is a graph where axis X contains a turnout percent (how many voters took part in voting at a polling station) and axis Y contains a number of polling stations with that value of turnout. Here is another graph [3]: axis X contains turnout percent, axis Y contains number of people registered at the polling stations and each point is a station (there are about 90 000 total in Russia). You can see that there are large polling stations with turnout above 90% and number of voters above 2000. You can also see that elections seem to be very popular as majority of the points lie in the right part of the graph. This graph [4] is built by the same rules, but contains data only on polling stations from one southern region - Ingushetia. You can see how neatly points align along the line at 80% turnout. People of Ingushetia are very active. These graphs [5] are built by the same rules, but for other region - Chechnya and for 4 different elections in 2011, 2012, 2016 and 2018. The perfect line in 2011 becomes diffused by 2018 and slightly shifts to the left. On the graph for year 2018 one can see that there are "atypical" polling stations who have suspiciously low turnout. One of possible explanations for this could be that in 2018 several dozens of brave volunteers decided to take a risk to go to Chechnya as observers. [1] https://habr.com/ru/post/352424/ https://habr.com/ru/post/352424/ [2] https://hsto.org/webt/2y/xh/wf/2yxhwffbr7oy0escvp1ecvmcjdc.png https://hsto.org/webt/2y/xh/wf/2yxhwffbr7oy0escvp1ecvmcjdc.p... [3] https://hsto.org/webt/4h/3e/ko/4h3ekola6f-to10zgpvlbg9bd1g.png https://hsto.org/webt/4h/3e/ko/4h3ekola6f-to10zgpvlbg9bd1g.p... [4] https://hsto.org/webt/ri/c6/ul/ric6ulcyzuefrxvnjm7n6g7qcz8.png https://hsto.org/webt/ri/c6/ul/ric6ulcyzuefrxvnjm7n6g7qcz8.p... [5] https://hsto.org/webt/dw/j2/bl/dwj2blnsrah7_fwkzbqk4eyucga.png https://hsto.org/webt/dw/j2/bl/dwj2blnsrah7_fwkzbqk4eyucga.p...

notfromhere 7y ago

Voting irregularities are pretty standard in Russia, lots of international observers and reports have established it. Opposition candidates are regularly jailed, major protests and civil actions are suppressed, and if you really get under the Kremlin's skin, you find yourself assassinated or thrown out of a window. Putin's Russia is a very blatant authoritarian regime.

m0zg 7y ago
Not just Putin's. There was only one time in my lifetime when nobody knew who would win the election. That was the 1996 election which was largely won by Yeltsin by hiring a bunch of consultants from the US to run it (and I also suspect that his campaign was at least in part financed by the US as well - his opponent was Gennady Zyuganov, a communist). Other than that I don't recall any even somewhat democratic elections at all. Needless to say, there weren't any real elections in the USSR either. Nor under Czar before that. It's a long, established tradition.
- orbital-decay 7y ago
  >largely won by Yeltsin by hiring a bunch of consultants from the US to run it You sure it wasn't due to other candidates giving up their ambitions to stop Zyuganov?
  - m0zg 7y ago
    Pretty sure. In the first round Zuyganov and Yeltsin were neck and neck. Zuyganov looked _very_ viable to most of the older voting population who had quite enough of the "wild 90's" and wanted to go back to the socialist certainty of how things were before Perestroika, at least to some extent, and Zuyganov promised exactly that. Or at least how they remembered how things were: people tend to forget the bad things first, this is called the "good old days syndrome". Russian presidents don't usually try to dance awkwardly on stage unless things are truly desperate: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cRysHHzLAmM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cRysHHzLAmM :-) The entirety of Russia's entertainment industry was paid huge amounts of cash, mostly under the table, to stage concerts in support of Yeltsin. Where that cash came from nobody knows to this day.
    - orbital-decay 7y ago
      >Russian presidents don't usually try to dance awkwardly on stage Probably not in the case of Yeltsin though, who willingly jumped from the CPSU Olympus once (which was probably the only relatively bright moment in his career) and was fairly eccentric otherwise, especially when drunk. I was one year short of the voting age back then, but I remember it very well. What you're saying is true, but you're only describing his "Vote or Lose" campaign. My impression was that he won mostly due to the support of the elites (aka oligarchs who owned the media) faced with the possibility of a communist president, not just because he paid the media. Also the support of other candidates, in particular he convinced Chernomyrdin and Nemtsov, fairly popular back then, to abstain from running for presidency in his favor, after they declared they would run for the office. Regarding the US consultants, I think his only foreign consultant was Tim Bell, who was British, IIRC he didn't design Yeltsin's Vote or Lose since his experience wasn't directly applicable in Russia, it was Malashenko who designed it.
      - m0zg 7y ago
        ^ This is so wonderfully naive, I'm at a loss for words. https://www.jacobinmag.com/2017/03/russia-us-clinton-boris-yeltsin-elections-interference-trump/ https://www.jacobinmag.com/2017/03/russia-us-clinton-boris-y...

m0zg 7y ago

Yes I am, in fact, a citizen of Russia. I'm also a US citizen. I know this because there's been both video and statistical evidence, as well as numerous reports of electoral district vote counters simply falsifying final vote tallies, people being bused around to vote in multiple districts, etc, etc. Statistical evidence of vote count manipulation is actually pretty damning. If you calculate the distribution of vote count _percentages_ across all electoral districts, you will see that there are spikes around multiples of 5 and 10%. That means the vote for the "right" candidate was rounded up to an even number on a statistically significant number of them.

ummonk 7y ago
Don’t those spikes happen in small districts though, where you’re likely to have 1,2,4,5,10,or20 votes which would all guarantee a result with a multiple of 5 or 10%?
- codedokode 7y ago
  I don't have those graphs with spikes at the moment, but there are more interesting ones. Here is an article in Russian with graphs [1]. This [2] is a graph where axis X contains a turnout percent (how many voters took part in voting at a polling station) and axis Y contains a number of polling stations with that value of turnout. Here is another graph [3]: axis X contains turnout percent, axis Y contains number of people registered at the polling stations and each point is a station (there are about 90 000 total in Russia). You can see that there are large polling stations with turnout above 90% and number of voters above 2000. You can also see that elections seem to be very popular as majority of the points lie in the right part of the graph. This graph [4] is built by the same rules, but contains data only on polling stations from one southern region - Ingushetia. You can see how neatly points align along the line at 80% turnout. People of Ingushetia are very active. These graphs [5] are built by the same rules, but for other region - Chechnya and for 4 different elections in 2011, 2012, 2016 and 2018. The perfect line in 2011 becomes diffused by 2018 and slightly shifts to the left. On the graph for year 2018 one can see that there are "atypical" polling stations who have suspiciously low turnout. One of possible explanations for this could be that in 2018 several dozens of brave volunteers decided to take a risk to go to Chechnya as observers. [1] https://habr.com/ru/post/352424/ https://habr.com/ru/post/352424/ [2] https://hsto.org/webt/2y/xh/wf/2yxhwffbr7oy0escvp1ecvmcjdc.png https://hsto.org/webt/2y/xh/wf/2yxhwffbr7oy0escvp1ecvmcjdc.p... [3] https://hsto.org/webt/4h/3e/ko/4h3ekola6f-to10zgpvlbg9bd1g.png https://hsto.org/webt/4h/3e/ko/4h3ekola6f-to10zgpvlbg9bd1g.p... [4] https://hsto.org/webt/ri/c6/ul/ric6ulcyzuefrxvnjm7n6g7qcz8.png https://hsto.org/webt/ri/c6/ul/ric6ulcyzuefrxvnjm7n6g7qcz8.p... [5] https://hsto.org/webt/dw/j2/bl/dwj2blnsrah7_fwkzbqk4eyucga.png https://hsto.org/webt/dw/j2/bl/dwj2blnsrah7_fwkzbqk4eyucga.p...