Fabricating votes for Putin: new tests of fraud and electoral manipulations from Russia

Regional protest and electoral fraud: evidence from analysis of new data on Russian protest

“…We accept that there may be a tendency of sub-national clients of the national regime to resort to multiple strategies of malpractice to ensure the desired result in the elections. In fact, in another paper we demonstrate that regional officials are likely to have used a variety of complementary types of electoral misconduct in the 2012 elections (Skovoroda and Lankina 2016). For instance, the strategy of tampering with ballots and vote counts is likely to have been augmented with both the pre-electoral manipulations, such as pressurising citizens to vote for the "right" candidate; and other election-day types of misconduct, such as, for instance, obstructing the work of electoral monitors at a given polling station.…”

“…Not only was the opposition allowed to contest the race, but considerable effort was made to reassure citizens that the electoral process will be transparent. Thus, cameras were installed in electoral precincts; and election monitors representing opposition parties were allowed access to polling stations (Skovoroda and Lankina 2016). This, of course, as we demonstrate in the paper, does not mean that fraud did not occur in the elections; rather, it allowed for the possibility of political competition at least in some electoral districts.…”

“…In free and fair elections, last digits ∈ {0,1, … ,9} in turnout counts reported by individual precincts with at least 100 registered voters can be regarded as outcomes of identical and independent multinomial trials while individual digits, and, in particular, last digit zeros, should be observed with uniform probability = = 0.1. Last digit tests that pool data across polling stations in Russia's March 2012 Presidential elections, while ignoring the differences across individual regions, strongly reject the hypothesis that the probability of last digit zeros is 10 percent for turnout counts, valid vote counts, and votes cast for the March 2012 Presidential elections winner Vladimir Putin (Skovoroda and Lankina 2016), while the hypothesis of uniform distribution of digits 1 to 9 (excluding last digit zeros) is rejected for turnout counts.…”

Bureaucratic discrimination in electoral authoritarian regimes: Experimental evidence from Russia

“…In our paper, we thus go beyond studies that document the existence of political machines (Gans-Morse et al 2014;Frye et al 2014;Kudelia and Kuzio 2015;Frye et al 2019a,b) or electoral fraud and manipulation during elections (Myagkov et al 2009;Enikolopov et al 2013;Simpser 2013;Harvey 2016;Skovoroda and Lankina 2017), and document an example for the systematic discrimination of entrepreneurs affiliated with the political opposition during everyday life, in an electoral authoritarian regime. Importantly, other than in studies focusing on the use of administrative resources during elections, where chains of command are often easier to detect, 1 in our research design it remains more difficult to discern the determinants for the bureaucratic behavior we observe.…”

‘Russian Spring’ or ‘Spring Betrayal’? The Media as a Mirror of Putin’s Evolving Strategy in Ukraine

“…In fact, as Andrew Wilson (2014, p. 66) reminds us, even before Yanukovych's 'volte face' on Vilnius, Ukrainian activists had been planning to stage demonstrations on November 22 to mark the ninth anniversary of the original 2004 Maidan and to register their frustration with Yanukovych. Two years before the Euromaidan, in the Winter months of 2011-2012, Russia also witnessed a mass uprising when thousands of protesters brandishing white ribbons-the symbol of the protest movement-took to the streets of Moscow, St. Petersburg and other cities across Russia (Skovoroda and Lankina 2016). The protesters challenged electoral misconduct perpetrated in the December State Duma (Parliamentary) elections and registered their anger at the prospect of Vladimir Putin being re-elected as President for a third time in the March 2012 Presidential elections.…”