The ruling pro-Kremlin United Russia party appears to have received only around 34% of the vote in the recent election to Russia’s lower house of parliament, the State Duma. Using a method developed by election statistician Sergei Shpilkin, an analysis by the independent outlet Novaya Gazeta Europe determined that the party’s official result of 57.8% shows every sign of having been significantly artificially inflated.
The method compares turnout with party results at individual polling stations. As the outlet explains, stations without pronounced statistical anomalies form a relatively even “core” on a graph, while a simultaneous rise in turnout and votes for one party at polling stations that submit manipulated results produces a distinctive “comet tail.”
Based on the available results, Novaya Gazeta Europe calculated that the center of the “core” of polling stations that submitted actual results showed an average of about 34% support for United Russia.
For its calculations, the publication assumed that votes cast for all parties other than United Russia had been counted correctly. It then compared the ratio of votes for United Russia with votes for the other parties at polling stations classified as part of the “honest core.”
Moscow was excluded from the analysis due to the fact that a large share of voters there cast ballots remotely, making the results difficult to compare with the broader pattern. The outlet also excluded several regions where it suspects United Russia was credited on a large scale with votes actually cast for other parties. Novaya Gazeta Europe noted that the Shpilkin method it used is primarily designed to identify statistical signs consistent with ballot stuffing.
