1. The CEC results
Here they are. The turnout was 32%.
- Sergey Sobyanin – 51.37%
- Alexei Navalny – 27.24%
- Ivan Melnikov – 10.69%
- Sergey Mitrokhin – 3.51%
- Mikhail Degtyaryov – 2.86%
- Nikolai Levichev – 2.79%
- Invalid ballots – 1.53%
2. Pre-elections opinion polls:
Navalny’s support – among those who indicated a clear preference for one candidate or another – rose from the single digits in June to around 20% on the eve of the elections (Levada, VCIOM, FOM, Synovate Comcon). All the polls – even including the SuperJob poll that only queried active workers, aka excluded pro-Sobyanin pensioners – gave Sobyanin more than 50% in the first round.
His actual result massively exceeded expectations. By common consensus, this was because the “party of the couch” won; although close to 50% of Muscovites were saying they were going to vote, only 32% ended up doing so. These were mainly Sobyanin supporters who were, nonetheless, loth to shift their butts to vote for an uninspiring if competent technocrat who had ran a most lacklustre campaign.
3. Election observers
In the SMS-ЦИК program, accredited election observers would send text messages from their polling stations with numbers from the protocols at their precinct. They could then be compared with the official CEC numbers.
And Sobyanin’s result here was 49.52%.
| Mikhail Degtyaryov |
2,77%
|
|
| Nikolay Levichev |
2,78%
|
|
| Ivan Melnikov |
10,82%
|
|
| Sergey Mitrokhin |
3,71%
|
|
| Alexei Navalny |
28,54%
|
|
| Sergey Sobyanin |
49,52%
|
|
| spoiled ballots |
1,86%
|
|
| from home |
4,61%
|
Does this mean he really did cheat Navalny out of a second round? Well, not necessarily.
Here’s a key caveat. Far from all polling stations were covered by the SMS-ЦИК. Their figures thus have a significant margin of error. I would speculate that the bias is, in fact, more likely to be in favor of Navalny than of Sobyanin, because the observers who would get involved in this project in the first place would likely be more liberal-leaning in the first place, would on average appear more frequently in the more oppositionist areas of town, and would and come to observe their local station.
Still, it’s not a shut and closed case. Someone should really make an analysis of which areas where covered by this program – and whether the sample really does favor Navalny as I reasonably hypothesized above.
4. Exit polls
These are, admittedly, all over the place. The Center of Political Technologies gave Sobyanin 56% and Navalny 29%; FOM – Sobyanin 52.5%, Navalny – 29%; VCIOM – Sobyanin 53%, Navalny 29%. An exit poll carried out by Navalny’s supporters gave him 35.6% to Sobyanin’s 46%, while the Communist Party claimed their candidate Melnikov performed much better, with 19%, than he did according to the official 11 – though their poll still gave Sobyanin a first round victory with 51%.
In conclusion, four out of five exit polls gave a first round victory to Sobyanin. The only one that didn’t was carried out by explicit supporters of the opposition candidate.
5. Statistical evidence
The art of electoral fraud detection via statistical means has come a long way (and has – probably not coincidentally – been mostly spearheaded by Russian mathematicians). You can read the details here.
Suffice to say that for a relatively homogenous city like Moscow, it is expected that each candidates turnout to vote share graph should resemble a Gaussian curve. And here it is for 2013: The mean for Sobyanin is 51.65%, and for Navalny – 28.1%.
Or, expressed in the form of a “heat graph” for any one candidate in which the turnout at each station is graphed to the result there, it should form a single concentrated dot. A long tail leading up and to the right, as well as additional distinct dots – especially if they are concentrated at around the 100%/100% – constitutes strong evidence for systemic election fraud.
In regards Moscow, its elections were clean up to and including 2003 or so. But then it started growing ever thicker tails, and additional concentrations popped up, to reach absolutely bizarre and astounding levels in the 2009 City Council elections and the 2011 parliamentary elections. But then it seems obvious that some kind of order and directive was passed down to clean them up, and the graphs snapped back to what they were before 2004 during the 2012 Presidential elections.
Now here is the heat graph for 2013. Which of the above does it most closely resemble?
The verdict: As in 2012, but not in 2004-2009, the Moscow mayoral election of 2013 didn’t see any significant fraud and Sobyanin won legitimately in the first round.
Dying Russia also suggests that Moscow results appeared to be clean:
http://dyingrussia.wordpress.com/2013/09/09/shocking-western-misreporting-of-moscow-mayoral-election-results/
The Great La Russophobe – Da Russophile Convegence continues apace.
Dear Anatoly,
I am going to say it again, La Russophobe is far too clever for the task she has given herself. It requires a quality of wilful blindness to deny reality and become a mere propagandist and she is simply too clever and realistic to have it.
For the rest, the most important thing about these elections is precisely that they were clean and fair and have been overwhelmingly accepted as such. Not just in Moscow either apparently but everywhere else as well. That is a major step forward.
I would add that another big step forward is that Navalny was able to hold a post election rally at which 9,000 people turned up without this being big news. That was emphatically not the case two years ago. It is the sign of a rapidly maturing and self confident democracy if protest rallies of this kind are able to pass off quietly and be accepted as routine.
One more point: This is that of course it is the normal pattern in most democracies for voter turnout to be comparatively low in local elections, which is what the elections on Sunday basically were. By those standards a 33% turnout was perfectly respectable. I have said some hard things about Sobyanin and his failure to bring his vote out but at the end of the day the fact that most people did not feel a pressing need to go out and vote in a local election but were content to stay at home and enjoy the weekend also shows how much more relaxed the political mood in the country and in Moscow has become and how the mood of crisis in the country has now dissipated.
It is business as usual in the more “relevant” quarters. 😉
http://www.worldaffairsjournal.org/blog/vladimir-kara-murza/moscow-official-win-big-loss-kremlin
“In Yekaterinburg, Russia’s fourth-largest city, residents elected opposition candidate Yevgeny Roizman as their new mayor”, writes Vladimir Kara-Murza.
No mention, of course, that Roizman is a convicted criminal strongly suspected of having ties with the notorious Uralmash gang.
The day after Roizman’s election victory, he was summoned to the Investigatory Committee for an interview.
So they got a thief in Ekaterinburg and narrowly avoided getting another one in Moscow.
As I have already commented on “The Russia Debate”, even chief headbanger Latynina at the Moscow Times has stated that the election was kosher in her opinion piece: “Finally, a clean election”, though she does strangely write that “Fair elections have returned to Moscow” .
This makes me wonder when that loon thinks elections were previously “fair”.
Back in the USSR? – Surely she doesn’t believe that to have been the case!
During Putin’s previous ministry or that of Medvedev?
I somehow don’t think she is implying that.
Does she mean during the golden Yeltsin years, as Navalny once described them, when Soviet Russia had been transformed into a land flowing with milk and honey, albeit that said rivers of milk and honey mostly flowed into off-shore accounts; when the Moscow White House suffered artillery bombardment because that drunken oaf of a president who ruled by decree did not agree with the opinions of its democratically elected deputies.?
With one noteable exception, right across the political spectrum the consensus is that they were fair. And the exception is, of course, Team Navalny.
The Chosen One and friends have already started the ball rolling big fashion in that the have already prepared 50,000 pages of writs to be presented to the Moscow courts demanding that a re-ballot take place.
See: “Навальный подготовил грузовик жалоб” [Navalny has prepared a truckload of complaints]
“Opposition leader Alexei Navalny, who in in the election for mayor had the support of over a quarter of Muscovites, has not abandoned his intention to have the election result canceled. In the near future he intends to file a complaint with the Moscow City Court.
‘Tomorrow morning, we are serving Moscow City Court: 1) an application to set aside the election results as a whole, and 2) 951 applications to the district court to cancel the election results …
‘… We are bringing approximately 50,000 pages on a truck’, he wrote in his blog. According to Navalny, as a basis for the submission of claims was the unequal access of candidates to the media, as well as food packages that were distributed to pensioners…”
A quarter of Muscovites voted for him says the above linked article.?
Surely 27% of the 30% of the electorate that voted for him does not represent 25% of Moscow’s population?
AK: Comment on topic or get lost.