It's not the voting that's democracy, it's the counting: Statistical detection of systematic election irregularities

Details It's not the voting that's democracy, it's the counting: Statistical detection of systematic election irregularities It's not the voting that's democracy, it's the counting: Statistical detection of systematic election irregularities

2012-01-15

arxiv.org/abs/1201.3087v2

Physics

Physics and Society

3 pages, 4 figures (main text)

Scientific paper

Democratic societies are built around the principle of free and fair elections, that each citizen's vote should count equal. National elections can be regarded as large-scale social experiments, where people are grouped into usually large numbers of electoral districts and vote according to their preferences. The large number of samples implies certain statistical consequences for the polling results which can be used to identify election irregularities. Using a suitable data collapse, we find that vote distributions of elections with alleged fraud show a kurtosis of hundred times more than normal elections. As an example we show that reported irregularities in the 2011 Duma election are indeed well explained by systematic ballot stuffing and develop a parametric model quantifying to which extent fraudulent mechanisms are present. We show that if specific statistical properties are present in an election, the results do not represent the will of the people. We formulate a parametric test detecting these statistical properties in election results. For demonstration the model is also applied to election outcomes of several other countries.

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