The Forensics of Election Fraud: Russia and Ukraine

by Mikhail Myagkov , Peter C. Ordeshook , Dimitri Shakin

• ISBN13: 9780521748360
• ISBN10: 0521748364
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2009-05-11
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

This volume offers a number of forensic indicators of election fraud applied to official election returns, and tests and illustrates their application in Russia and Ukraine. Included are the methodology's econometric details and theoretical assumptions. The applications to Russia include the analysis of all federal elections between 1996 and 2007 and, for Ukraine, between 2004 and 2007. Generally, we find that fraud has metastasized within the Russian polity during Putin's administration with upwards of 10 million or more suspect votes in both the 2004 and 2007 balloting, whereas in Ukraine, fraud has diminished considerably since the second round of its 2004 presidential election where between 1.5 to 3 million votes were falsified. The volume concludes with a consideration of data from the United States to illustrate the dangers of the application of our methods without due consideration of an election's substantive context and the characteristics of the data at hand.

Author Biography

Mikhail Myagkov is Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Oregon, Eugene. Peter C. Ordeshook is Professor of Political Science at the California Institute of Technology. Dimitri Shakin is Senior Researcher, Academy of National Economy, Moscow.

Table of Contents

List of Tables	p. vii
List of Figures	p. ix
Introduction	p. 1
A Forensics Approach to Detecting Election Fraud	p. 12
Fraud and Forensics	p. 12
The Special Relevance of Russia and Ukraine	p. 25
Outline	p. 29
The Fingerprints of Fraud	p. 30
Indicators	p. 30
Turnout and Absolute Vote	p. 32
The Distribution of Turnout	p. 42
Stuffed Ballot Boxes versus Stolen Votes	p. 44
The Flow of Votes	p. 47
Evaluating our Ecological Method	p. 53
Simulating Fraud	p. 59
Overview	p. 69
Russia	p. 71
Suspicious Anomalies of Russian Elections	p. 71
The Distribution of Turnout	p. 82
Who Wins the Extra Votes	p. 90
The Flow of Votes	p. 101
Republics versus Oblasts	p. 109
Trends in Russian "Democracy" and the 2007 Duma Vote	p. 116
Players and Motives	p. 135
Ukraine 2004	p. 138
Rounds 1 and 2, 2004	p. 138
December 26, 2004	p. 162
Motives	p. 178
Ukraine 2006 and 2007	p. 183
The Parliamentary Election of 2006	p. 183
The 2007 Contest	p. 197
Conclusions	p. 227
The United States	p. 233
California, North Carolina, and Arizona	p. 233
Florida	p. 244
Idaho and Texas	p. 247
Ohio 2004	p. 253
Conclusions	p. 265
References	p. 275
Index	p. 279
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