(1) United Russia was polling at around 40% according to different pollsters (both state-owned FOM and VCIOM, as well as independent Levada) in the run-up to the elections. However, adjusting for undecideds would raise it to 55%.
This is in line with United Russia’s official tally of 54.14%.
That said, it should be noted that Russian pollsters tend to overestimate popular support for the party of power (an ironic consequence of their models being constructed on the assumption that there is no electoral fraud).
(2) For the first time, there was a US-style predictions market organized by VCIOM, which had United Russia getting 44%.
(3) The VCIOM exit poll had United Russia getting 44.5%, and FOM had it getting 48.4%, implying a 6-10% discrepancy versus the official results.
(4) There have been some videos of apparent ballot stuffing. Whether or not they were real is irrelevant. The vast bulk of Russian electoral fraud takes place during the counting phase.
(5) Using the Gaussian method, made famous in 2011, Sergey Shpilkin comes out with an estimate of 14% fraud during these elections (see also by region). The basic idea is that the number of votes each party receives should abide by a single bell curve relative to turnout. This happens for United Russia across the left hand side of the bell curve, but begins to diverge more and more as turnout increases – a phenomenon that could be explained by turnout being inflated by fictitious votes for United Russia.
As I wrote in my 2011 post on the mathematics of Russian electoral fraud, Shpilkin’s method almost certainly overstates the level of fraud because an alternative explanation is that the sorts of people who vote for United Russia also tend to turn out more (e.g. rural areas vs. urban areas was a classical case of precisely that in 2011, which the then head of the Central Election Commission Vladimir Churov brought up to argue that fraud was minimal). There are also plenty of cases of this exact phenomenon in developed countries, such as the UK and Germany, where the share of votes accruing to their respective conservative parties, the Tories and the CDU, increase with turnout.
As such, most serious, statistics-based estimates of the level of fraud in the 2011 elections hovered between 5% and 10% (with around 8-9% being the likeliest), and 4-7% (with around 5-6% being the likeliest) in the 2012 elections. Even though this Gaussian method doesn’t work as a good estimator of absolute fraud, it is presumably pretty good at gauging the levels of relative fraud across elections; historically, it yielded a figure of 16% in the 2011 Duma elections, and 6% in the 2012 Presidential elections. The 14% figure that Shpilkin came up with this time round implies that fraud was higher than in 2012, but lower than in 2011 – perhaps 7-8%.
This rough estimate is supported by the fact that United Russia got almost exactly 5% points more than in 2011. Likewise, the VCIOM opinion polls immediately prior to the elections – not a great indicator of absolute support by themselves, but useful for comparisons across time – showed United Russia as being 5% points more popular now than in 2011.
This is an additional hint that the level of fraud was similar to that seen in 2011.
However, it is virtually certain not to excite any protests because (1) Putin is himself much more popular now than he was in 2011, (2) the Western-orientated opposition has discredited itself by opposing Crimea’s return to its traditional homeland, and (3) elections in Moscow, the most (relatively) oppositionist city, have been consistently clean since 2012.
(6) United Russia massively increased its share of the seats from 52.9% to 76.2%, forming an easy supermajority with a margin of 10% points.
There would have been no major differences without fraud. Russia’s shift to a partial FPTP system meant that 2/3 of the seats would have been assured even if the level of fraud was at Shpilkin’s 14%.
(7) The Western-orientated parties, aka the so-called “genuine” opposition: With just 2.0% of the vote, the liberal-left Yabloko party would not have broken the 3% required for state financing, not to even mention the 5% barrier for representation in the Duma. However, at least Yabloko has some genuine roots in Russia. PARNAS, the current home to most of Russia’s foreign grant-eating and WSJ oped-writing opposition, got a mere 0.7%. The only place where they enjoy significant support is in Moscow and Saint-Petersburg, where their combined share of the vote was at 11%-12%.
Their platform of giving Crimea to Ukraine is just not that popular, least of all in Crimea itself, where their combined votes were a mere 1.2% of the total (making it yet another data piece that gives to lie to Western propaganda that Russia is “occupying” Crimea). Incidentally, PARNAS even went so far as to ask Ukraine for official permission to campaign in Crimea (Kiev refused. Sad!).
(8) I was on record saying that with the introduction of the partial FPTP system, the degree of falsification should fall:
Second, it will also massively lower the incentives for direct falsifications, which are a very prominent and undeniable stain on Russia’s elections in the past decade. After all while in a proportional system falsification will have a direct and immediate impact on the result, in a mixed system United Russia or UR-friendly candidates will be sweeping the constituency elections anyway. Ergo much smaller degrees of fraud or even the absence of fraud would still result in better results for UR than the c.8% falsification in its favor in the 2011 elections everything else being equal.
This was not just my opinion, here is Bershidsky saying the same thing earling this year:
In September, this Duma will be replaced by a new one, and if there’s any vote-rigging, it will be much harder to notice than in 2011. Putin doesn’t want to be accused of cheating.
The levels of fraud did decline relative to 2011, but only modestly.
Why does the Kremlin still bother to falsify when it could enjoy greater legitimacy by keeping them clean? There are academic theories that electoral fraud, even when victory is assured, is still “rational” from the POV of an authoritarian ruler. Falsification helps you signal such overwhelming dominance that it effectively demoralizes the opposition {Simpser 2013}. But this can backfire (see the Moscow protests in 2011), and besides, there are very real benefits even for authoritarian polities to keep their elections clean – namely, to credibly signal regime strength and to receive reliable information on their true level of political support. These benefits are especially germane for dictators with “rich financial resources, disciplinary ruling organizations, and weak opposition” {Higashijima 2014). Russia satisfies all three conditions.
Allow me to advance a more banal thesis: Electoral fraud in Russia is largely a function of regional corruption as opposed to a conscious game theoretic strategy, and one which the Kremlin is as little interest in addressing as corruption in its own elite ranks (post-2011 Moscow is the only prominent exception to this).
Map of Russian election fraud in 2011 by region (green = fair) based on Dmitry Kogan’s estimates, compiled by Kireev.
Map of corruption prevalence in Russia based on a 2011 FOM survey.
Dat Finno-Ugric admixture line yo.
(9) The nationalist Liberal Democratic Party – yes, Russians invented Alt Right trolling a couple of decades in advance of Americans – has massively improved its position, drawing level with the Communist Party.
Second place: Yellow = LDPR won, Red = KPRF won. Map via Kireev.
I recall some Communists in 2011 expressing the hope that the party would be revitalized by an influx of new blood, but these hopes appear to have completely flopped.
According to the VCIOM exit poll, while United Russia voters are largely uniform across age groups, this is not the case for the Reds vs. Browns. Whereas 60+ year old Communist voters hugely outnumber 18-24 year old LDPR voters, by 22% to 10%, amongst LDPR voters the relationship is the complete inverse, with 60+ year old LDPR voters being outnumber by 18-24 year old LDPR voters by 19% to 8%.
As an LDPR voter myself, I am pretty chummed with these results – the best for the party since 1993.
However, this is counteracted by a genuinely worrisome trend. Moscow’s 115+ IQ yuppie latte sipping skinny jeans wearing Western cargo cult worshipping class is thoroughly pozzed. A stunning 45% of voters at the Moscow State University polling station voted for Yabloko and PARNAS. A good half of Russia’s future intellectual elites are basically cucks who are happy to sell their own countrymen down their river if it helps them get visa-free travel to Europe and accolades from budding Corpse-in-Chief Clinton.
Any idea how the other 55% at MSU voted?
Anatoly, you’re alive! I was hoping Sailer or Unz would do welfare check on you to make sure you’re ok. I’m sure Sailer would do it but he’d first have to bum some gas money off someone or look for loose change in his couch.
I’m sure you don’t need post topic suggestions, but I couldn’t resist:
A post comparing and contrasting Trump and Zhirinovsky could be fun.
I was a Europe-worshipping liberal when I was 20. Perharps, Anatoly should cut these MSU students some slack.
[Moscow’s 115+ IQ yuppie latte sipping skinny jeans wearing Western cargo cult worshipping class is thoroughly pozzed. A stunning 45% of voters at the Moscow State University polling station voted for Yabloko and PARNAS. A good half of Russia’s future intellectual elites are basically cucks who are happy to sell their own countrymen down their river if it helps them get visa-free travel to Europe and accolades from budding Corpse-in-Chief Clinton.]
1937.
All these estimates of electoral fraud based on Gaussian etc. are not credible, because they do not take into account real electoral situation in Russia.
Just look at that map of “election fraud” by region. Why most of this supposed fraud happens in Russia’s national republics?
The answer is simple: Russia’s ethnic minorities have far less choice than ethnic Russians:
Vote for nationalists like Zhirinovsky and LDPR? Absolutely not.
Vote for liberals? No, they despise ‘Asianness’ and pray for the ‘enlightened West’.
Vote for Just Russia? Members of this party affiliated with liberals during 2011 protests and even prior to them.
Vote for Communists? No, they deported some ethnicities in the USSR, persecuted religions and also gave far less autonomy to minorities.
So basically the choice for non-ethnic Russians is narrowed to Putin and United Russia. Also this party has most non-ethnic Russian members. As simple as that, and no need to talk about fraud.
This is partially true.
Electoral fraud does indeed tend to be endemic in the ethnic minority republics.
However, there are plenty of ordinary ethnic Russian majority oblasts that qualify as well.
E.g., here is Kemerovo:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0ByFMnUnpIlriM1BCdkk4QVVpaUk/
I agree that LDPR isn’t popular with ethnic minorities for obvious reasons. However, the Communists get lots of votes in those regions (once they are adjusted for fraud).
http://ic.pics.livejournal.com/kireev/2901613/478086/478086_original.png
In the 2011 elections, the polling stations in Dagestan that didn’t get the memo to falsify had the Communists winning almost 30%.
Like nobody outside a few diaspora organizations gives a fuck about Stalinist-era deportations (which only affected a few minorities anyway). And commies gave minorities lots of autonomy. Most of the bigger ones even got national republics of their own!
[Moscow’s 115+ IQ yuppie latte sipping skinny jeans wearing Western cargo cult worshipping class is thoroughly pozzed. A stunning 45% of voters at the Moscow State University polling station voted for Yabloko and PARNAS. A good half of Russia’s future intellectual elites are basically cucks who are happy to sell their own countrymen down their river if it helps them get visa-free travel to Europe and accolades from budding Corpse-in-Chief Clinton.]
1937.
1941.
1945.
(This is too easy!)
Not nearly as much whining and complaining from Western media entities compared to what we have experienced in 2011. Western kremlinology certainly grew in scope and sophistication over the last few years (Snowden was working for SVR all along; Putin is the richest man in the world; Trump is Putin’s agent). Instances of minor voting fraud do not seem very sensational in comparison.
PS glad ur not ded
Just a side note, by many Russians (and there are very many with rudimentary English) PARNAS was promptly named a PornAss.
It might have been funny, but there are hardly any Finno-Ugric influence. Mordovia and Yamalia are brown-red, Mari El and Komi are red, Udmurtia is yellow. It is rather down to the corruption of the local elites, which is unpredictable, or rather down to the population size, the sparsely populated regions tend to be green.
And it is indeed sad that Putin again and again disappoints the West with the frauds. How could he! Washington and Bruxelles have longed for a “Red-Brown” Russian Duma for a very long time, haven’t they, he-he? “Putin, you thug, return the stolen votes to the Communists and the Fascists, right now!”, as if Washington and Bruxelles want to say with these fraud exposures.
(((Zhirinovsky-Edelstein))) is a psychotic attention seeking clown, he is not a Russian nationalist, he’s a populist at best. But I agree, he would never be popular among non-Russians with his rhetoric.
But the “liberals” are Russophobes and have always supported non-Russian nationalists and separatists. Their pro-Western stance is as strong as their anti-Russian stance. So they could have sympathizers among educated non-Russians, who do not like Russians.
A spoiler puppet party. Not much to say. They’ll do everything what the Kremlin says.
The KPRF have hardly anything to do with the USSR and genuine communism. And communists always favoured the minorities, I do not buy this lie “the Bolsheviks hated minorities”, they’ve actually crated dozens of autonomy entities for non-Russians.
And the KPRF now support and like religion, and Zyuganov now says things like “Christianity was like early Communism”.
The only thing which may turn non-Russians off is the KPRF’s support for Stalin (however, they always denounce the repressions), but only those who were perished (Chechens, Ingushes, Kalmyks, etc.) hate Stalin. For Dagestanis, Bashkirs or Ossetians, Stalin is not a big deal (actually under Stalin they all got their republics).
The early bolshevik era was almost a case of minority rule, there’s a book about this Affirmative Action Empire, it’s on my wishlist. Is there any kind of legitimate nationalist opposition group or has Putin banned all of them?
The “liberals” are a somewhat disparate group. Quite a few of them actually tend to sympathize with Russian nationalists in their opposition to immigration and the Caucasian question. They were allies in the protest movement, joined by their mutual hatred of Putin. Navalnyi himself is something of a liberal/nationalist hybrid. He makes sure to participate in the Russian March when it’s permitted.
In terms of the electorate, liberals usually tend to be disdainful of minorities. And non-Russians, the educated ones also, know this. I think the only non-Russian support liberal politicians get is from the self-haters, like the Russian liberals themselves.
Do you mean legitimate as in legal, or one that you feel legitimately represents Russian nationalists? There are lots of parties, they are seldom banned. In this year’s election, a revamped Rodina tried to capture some of the nationalist vote, but only got around 2% I think.
“Anatoly, you’re alive! I was hoping Sailer or Unz would do welfare check on you to make sure you’re ok. I’m sure Sailer would do it but he’d first have to bum some gas money off someone or look for loose change in his couch”
+1000. So glad to see you back posting, Anatoly.
I prefer the Hebrew interpretation:
–> a group of people chosen by the community to manage its material needs and representation before the authorities.
As you go north and east in Russia, you tend to get: (1) Lower fertility rates; (2) More binge drinking; (3) Higher mortality rates; (4) Higher murder rates; (5) Higher performance on test scores, and therefore IQ; (6) less corruption; (7) less electoral fraud; (8) less support for KPRF, and more support for both liberals and LDPR; (9) Greater Finno-Ugric admixture, though culturally they have all been thoroughly Slavicized more than a millennium ago.
It’s definitely a pattern.
But local elites are just a subset of the local population. Even if there is selection for greater corruption and venality amongst the elites – a thesis I actually agree with – those elites would still tend to be more corrupt in places where the ordinary people also show a greater tendency towards corruption.
There are two very good reasons to vote LDPR for Russian nationalists even if they have misgivings about Zhirik (whose half-lawyer background is no secret to anyone BTW).
(1) It moves the Overton Window in the desired direction, and if it moves far enough, the mainstream itself will be forced to either evolve or perish. Trump is of course the classic example of this, being a 1% globalist Clinton donor who has adopted many nationalist talking points and moved a large part of the GOP, including its evangelical elements, along with him while the cuckservatives and #NeverTrump’ers sink into oblivion. See also (((Sarkozy))), who went from railing about the need for métissage to becoming as hardcore on immigration as Le Pen today.
(2) As the neoreactionaries say, “No enemies to the right.” This is really an extension of the previous point.
Thanks. I’m very busy preparing for … travel.
Will have a post on that in a couple of days.
Sarko only has a single Jewish grandparent (a society clap doctor like the father of Duff Cooper); I’m not sure he has earned the parentheses, although one of his offspring, as is the case with Trump and Putin, has chosen a family connection with Jews and big money.
Having a single jewish grandparent grants automatic citizenship to Israel. Since the jewish homeland considers him jew, then its good enough for the the rest of us to use the brackets for him.
People do not vote randomly and do not vote evenly from region to region.
Check the rating of effictiveness of governors in Russia, 2015 http://civilfund.ru/mat/92 and previous editions.
Kemerovo Oblast – Aman Tuleyev, governor since 1997, in top 10 most effective governors.
Belgorod Oblast – Evgeny Savchenko, governor since 1993 (!), in top 10 most effective governors. He manages his region extremely well – AFAIK for many years it is the only region in Central Russia (besides Moscow) with population growth. Very successful in agriculture and food industry, clean cities tec.
Tyumen Oblast – Vladimir Yakushev, governor only since 2005, but in top 10, manages very prosperous region thanks to oil and gas.
Voronezh Oblast – Alexey Gordeyev, governor since only 2009, but in top 20, and in 1999-2009 he was Minister of Agriculture in the Russian Government, agriculture started booming under his ministry (by now Russia #1 exporter of wheat).
Krasnodar Krai – Aleksandr Tkachyov, governor between 2000-2015, now Minister of Agriculture (Krasnodar Krai is Russia’s ‘agricultural capital’).
All these guys are from United Russia (some are also ex-KPRF).
Isn’t it obvious, that when a region is relatively prosperous (except for Moscow & SPb) and has long-standing, highly-respected and efficient governor from the United Russia party – than this party wins in this region with high result?
[And the KPRF now support and like religion]
So did the late Hugo Chávez, it’s one of the signs of a relatively uncucked left nowadays.
Does anyone here know if she won her election:
https://theintercept.com/2016/09/16/trump-supporter-running-office-moscow-focuses-campaign-trashing-clinton/
And yes, I did “google it” and could not find any updates on this.
Having a single Jewish grandparent was no impediment to becoming an NSDAP cabinet minister.
The NSDAP did not openly endorse having quarter jews being part of them. Under the Nuremburg laws having just one jewish grandparent counted one as a mischling and not a full German. Those people that manage to get to senior positions did so by bribing top officials and keeping their past secret, had their true ancestry been made public then there is no way that they would have been tolerated.
I assume Boris’ point was that Mordovia and surroundings are certainly former Finno-Ugric regions too, but there is no such pattern there (communists are supported over LDPR, there’s no less fraud and so on) . If you compare Moscow to Mordovia or Udmurtia there’s less difference in these than if you went to Novgorod or Arkhangelsk.
Generalfeldmarschall Milch, who had a Jewish father, certainly falsified his papers with official complicity, but I know of no evidence that Reichsminister Rust did the same.
@5371:
Hugo Chavez was clearly a Christian believer of some stripe, but he had a very rocky relationship with the main institutional church in his country (apparently at one point he considered going evangelical).
I must say that I quite like the KPRF’s recent turn towards a more friendly approach towards religion, as well as their increasing criticism of mass immigration (e.g. the case of that nanny in Moscow who beheaded her charge).
I’m not happy with these election results (I’m a KPRF sympathizer through and through, but the nice thing is that at least the liberals got screwed).
Thanks for the summary and crunching the numbers.
Peace.
Sadly – no. Still – Katasonova is epic.
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Cskvg2tWYAEcUhw.jpg
The Non-Russian North Caucasus was in fact part of the Red Belt, the Communist heartland, in the 1990s. They’re not anti-communist at all.
Lol wut? Sarkozy isn’t Jewish, he’s Hungarian. Even Le Pen Sr. never accused Sarkozy of being Jewish. He is like 1/8 Sephardic, doesn’t even have real Ashkenazic blood.
And double lol at comparing open borders Sarkozy to Marine.
The Red Belt is crumbling.
Even in Oryol Oblast, the birthplace of comrade Zyuganov, United Russia now vastly outnumbers communists. No wonder, people there are just too tired of poor management by the communists throughout 1990s and 2000s.
Good idea.
Or how about a post comparing and contrasting Trump and Berlusconi, including a discussion of Berlusconi’s ties to Putin?
Greasy, you do know that Sephhardim are also Jewish, right? They simply have more Semitic (Arab-ish) genetic background, while the Ashkenazim have more substantial white European genes (overwhelmingly German and Slavic).
According to recent genetic studies, the Ashkenazim (of which I’m one) are about half Middle Eastern and half southern European, with the latter part coming mostly from Italy.
It seems that a small group of Jewish men came to Italy in Roman times, either as merchants or as prisoners of war after one of the Judean revolts, and married local Italian women, with the resulting community quickly becoming endogamous.
Sephardim aren’t as Jewish as Ashkenazim are. Their culture isn’t very Jewish, more Islamic, really.
If you look at where they show up on principal component plots drawing from the whole genome, you can tell there’s no reason to buy the “middle eastern” spin. Generic ancient Mediterranean, that’s it.
At the level of personal subjective feelings Jews are to me, among other things, funny, bookish neurotic people. And since most Sephardim aren’t that, they don’t feel very Jewish to me. For example, Jewish humor is really just Ashkenazy humor.
But I’m 100% sure that the Sephardic attitude is a mirror image of the above. Meaning that to them I, my family and everyone like us must not feel very Jewish at all. To them Jews would be people like them, so they would interpret every difference in personality, looks, culture, etc. between us and them as evidence of us not being very Jewish.
All of my knowledge of this comes from reading abstracts of studies and blog posts by people like Razib.
And this model with two components of roughly equal size – a Middle Eastern one and a mostly-Italian one – seems to be the majority opinion.
It makes historical sense. All the other Jewish groups seem to be a mixture of a local component (North African, Yemeni, East Indian, Caucasian, whatever) and a second component that’s common to all of them. Presumably that second component comes from ancient Judea.
I’ve read that the Druze have a closer genetic affinity to Jews than most Middle Eastern groups – that would make sense.
I mean that their culture isn’t Torah based, like authentic Ashkenazic Jewish culture is.
If an Ashkenazic haredi boy decides he is going to be secular, he is disowned from his family and kicked out of the community. Sephardim just leave the level of observance up to the individual. An Ashkenazi’s religion is the Torah, a Sephardi’s religion is “moderation”.
Judaism is not a moderate religion. Any “moderate” Judaism, which Sephardic Judaism certainly is, not not really Judaism at all.
Why do keep Jews taking over the comment sections?
1) Do you have a source for that with all relevant statistical data?
2) Are you aware that there are other Universities in Moscow? Because your “good half of Russia’s future intellectual elites” is way to ballsy.
3) Are you aware that quite a large number of students in Moscow Unis and Intitutes are inogorodniye who might either don’t bother to vote at all or, if they can travel back to their places of registration, vote there and not at MSU’s polling station?
(1) Results at MSU: http://www.moscow_city.vybory.izbirkom.ru/region/moscow_city?action=show&global=true&root=774027013&tvd=4774027133060&vrn=100100067795849&prver=0&pronetvd=0®ion=77&sub_region=77&type=242&vibid=4774027133060
(2) Fiztech has similar numbers, I assume so do the other top universities in Moscow.
(3) The people who vote at the MSU polling station will still be mostly students. And a significantly higher percentage of them voted for Yabloko/PARNAS than even the central “kreakl” regions. It is therefore safe to say that MSU students lean extreme liberal by Russian standards.
Thank you for providing the statistics. For those of you, who on’t know Russian/have aversion for clicking links, here is and iteresing part – there were only 335 votes casted at that polling station. MSU has about 50 000 students. Using data from less than 1% of the demographic is hardly a science at all – more like wishful thinking.
Oh, btw, want to know the results? Here they are:
1) Yabloco – 113.
2) Communist Party of Russian Federation (CPRF) – 70.
3) United Russia – 53.
4) ParNaS – 37.
5) Fair/Just Russia – 15.
6) LDRP, The Greens, Party of the Growth – 10 each one.
7) Rodina – 8.
8) Communists of Russia, Party of the Pensioners for Justness – 3 each one.
9) Civil Platform, Civil Force, Patriots of Russia – 1 each one.
When dealing with statistics and claiming that “All/Half/Significant part of X is Y” you don’t assume things. You either know or don’t. No place for fantasies.
335/50,000 within 95% confidence interval gives a margin of error of 5.4% points. So it is actually pretty damn robust.
So the only possible way in which MSU students might not be extremely liberal-leaning is if the ones who stayed to vote were extremely unrepresentative of the student body at large. Do you have any evidence for that?
Common sense.
Look how well “Stay” did with young voters in Brexit. Is that because most young Britons are open borders cucks or just because those who cared enough to vote were open borders cucks? Obviously it is the latter.
Who stayed to vote at the university polling station as opposed to voting back home, which is part of what Lyttenburgh was arguing happened (“are you aware that quite a large number of students in Moscow Unis and Intitutes are inogorodniye who might either don’t bother to vote at all or, if they can travel back to their places of registration, vote there and not at MSU’s polling station?“).
I suppose greater relative mobilization on the part of liberal voters was a factor in these elections. Still, Prokhorov beat Putin in MSU in 2012 (the only other areas of note where that happened was in the Far Abroad).
[Look how well “Stay” did with young voters in Brexit. Is that because most young Britons are open borders cucks or just because those who cared enough to vote were open borders cucks? Obviously it is the latter.]
I fear it is also the former. Far too many young “Britons”, indeed, are mudbloods themselves.