The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and Western media report that Austrian researchers have managed to prove that the latest parliamentary election in Russia was falsified.
Is it really possible to prove a case of election fraud by means of mathematics and statistics? What are the facts and arguments given by those scientists?
The experts of Market Leader and will help us to answer these questions…
Arguments?
As for the arguments and facts proving the fraud, we can hardly find any of them. According to Eugene Olkhovsky, ’s leading expert from Canada.
For example, the following article published in PHYS.ORG reads the following (pay attention to the underlined words and phrases):
“A team of Austrian researchers has applied a new statistical method in looking at elections in various countries and the ways that some of them might be influenced by fraud, and have found, as they describe in their paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, that two recent elections stood out as likely suspect, one in Uganda and one in Russia.”
The statement suggests some uncertainty about their conclusions, which is natural because they cannot know that for sure.
The authors say that Russia’s ruling party would have hardly received even 40% of votes but for ballot rigging.
For reference sake, right after the election in Russia, the Wall Street Journal studied the election results to find a range of statistical disparities, which gave other researchers an idea that the election might be fraudulent. At that time, 14 million out of 65.7 million votes looked suspicious as the ruling party won the election in federal districts where the attendance was above 70%.
Expert Opinion: Austrian Researchers’ Conclusion Can Hardly Be treated Seriously
According to Boris Stolyarov (stop-news.com), a respected scientist from Israel (PhD in Mathematics), it is possible to discover election fraud by means of statistical analysis. However, a considerable array of statistical data is needed to conduct research. Did they have such an array? Hardly possible. That is why any further discussion of the issue is pointless.
Approximate methods (like the one used by Austrian researchers) cannot be reliable in essence, the expert says. They [methods] have little to do with mathematics and statistics. In this case, this is just a tool for political games.
Mr. Stolyarov neither admits nor denies the supposition that United Russia (Yedínaya Rossíya) has falsified the election results simply because he doesn’t know that for sure (he hasn’t conducted any comprehensive research because he doesn’t have the required statistics). Any other statement is just a subjective point of view, which doesn’t prove anything.
Moreover, the very fact that “a team of Austrian researchers has applied a new statistical method” doesn’t have a leg to stand on.
Firstly, the global scientific community hasn’t heard anything about this magic method.
Secondly, no matter how powerful the given method is, it requires the input data anyway.
Later, we found out that the model functions well only if there are detailed voting results for all the districts. In other words, the authors sort of hint that they received data for several isolated regions (without being able to draw a full picture) and some software composed charts, which allowed the researchers to spot some major deviations exceeding common statistical inaccuracies.
To clarify the situation, let’s cite an example:
Let assume that federal district A reports about the fact that 50% of the local electorate has voted for United Russia (Yedínaya Rossíya) while federal district B reports that 40% of the local electorate has voted for same party. “How come the results differ for the neighboring districts?”, the researchers ask themselves… and decide that 10% was added deliberately to fraud the election.
However, the explanation is simple:
The electorate of district A consists mainly of retired people while the electorate of district B consists of those people who work for Prokhorov. Consequently, they voted for his party.
Therefore, we cannot prove that election fraud this way. As you remember, the quotation given in the very beginning of the article reads that some elections “might be influenced by fraud” and that “two recent elections stood out as likely suspect, one in Uganda and one in Russia.”
This statement suggests uncertainty. How can any proof be attended by uncertainty? This is nonsense!
So, we can definitely say that this is just another supposition. It doesn’t prove anything except its inconsistency. The distance between suspicion and proof is roughly equal to the distance between Austria and the Sun.
Another Dirty PR Campaign Against Russia?
According to Eugene Olkhovsky Austrian researchers’ conclusion looks like the start of an anti-United Russia PR campaign in mass media. It doesn’t prove any election fraud, it just makes people doubt and question the legitimacy of United Russia’s election victory.
It is strange to see that Western “scientists” and “researchers” debased themselves by spreading rumors in the hope that people would start to believe them. Even during the years of the Cold War between the USSR and the USA, political scientists didn’t stoop to such miserable methods…
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