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50 I Eastern Europe bne August 2020
Golos broke the problems down into four major categories: the lack of a legal framework for the vote; the problematic formulation of
with a 65% turnout (both numbers are suspected to have been inflated) but 68% of 78% is 50.7%. In other words, just over half of Russia’s entire population
In Russia this study found that not only is the voting pattern dragged to towards the top right hand corner, but in that corner there is a second intense pattern of voting. This corresponds
to the difficult to explain 100% vote for Putin that several republics in
the Caucasus reported in the last presidential election – and in some cases like Chechnya the official result was even over 100%.
Shpilkin’s study also finds that the “for” vote is dragged up into the top right hand corner where the turnout tends
to 100% and the vote “for” also tends to 100%, whereas the “no” vote tends to zero as the turnout tends to 100%.
At a more mundane level opposition groups that carried out their own independent exit polls found that in contradiction to the official results, the majority of Muscovites and St Peterburgers voted against the change to the constitution.
According to the polls of the “NO!” campaign, 53% voted against the motion and only 47% were for. In St Petersburg the no vote was even bigger. with 62% opposing the motion and 38% for. According to the official count, both cities voted for the motion in the majority.
“68% of 78% is 50.7%. In other words, just over half of Russia’s entire population voted for the constitutional changes – an absolute majority”
the question; the Central Election Commission and government agencies campaigning in support of the amendments; and forced voting and the falsification of votes.
Asked how the Kremlin views the results, presidential spokesman Dmitry Peskov called the plebiscite a “triumph.”
“It was easy to predict high interest in these amendments,” Peskov said. “But, of course, the incredible turnout and level of support now confirmed today was in fact very hard to anticipate.”
Russia’s central election commissioner Elena Panfilova says her office didn’t receive a single complaint worth investigating.
Spiking results
Now the vote is over Shpilkin has produced a study of the results which bear the tell- tale spikes around the numbers 0 and 5. Election officials charged with beefing up vote counts to reach a goal set by the Kremlin have the very human habit of rounding up the vote to the nearest five or zero. But as voting patterns are supposed to produce a random distribution of numbers, that means there are too many results at the zero and five mark, easily seen with the naked eye as a spike.
The result of the Russian referendum vote bears those hallmark spikes and Shpilkin estimates than additional 22mn votes were injected into the count to get the desired result and the true turnout was 42%, not 65%.
Another mathematical oddity of the result is that the "for" vote was 78%
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voted for the constitutional changes – an absolute majority of the citizenship.
This is not the first time this has happened. In the 2018 presidential election Putin won a landslide 76.69% of the vote with a 67.54% turnout. That means Putin won the votes of 51.8% of all Russians in another election where there was substantial reported vote rigging.
Another study that looks at how the voting patterns change with the local turnout found in fixed elections the higher the turnout is, the most likely the vote will be for the government. In free and fair elections the votes are evenly distributed around the centre of the chart, whereas in fixed elections the pattern is pulled into the top right hand corner. (Higher support for a leader is plotted on the y axis, higher turnout is on the x axis.)