New parameters to explore

Since the summer of 2020 in Russia, early, early at home, and at-home (so-called "bad") voting has become massively influencing the outcome of elections. Previously, if such forms existed, they were of insignificant scale.

These forms have little or no independent civilian oversight. Except for one thing: official data statistics. Therefore, with EDG 2020 we introduce new parameters for analysis.

Percentages of invalid votes, early votes and conditional "normal voting" i.e., standard voting at the polling station on election day;

All parameters are displayed as a percentage of the number of participants, of the number of registered voters and in absolute terms.

We hope that the new methods of the crooks to escape civilian control will give us new methods to catch these crooks.

We can already see that in many regions the percentage of invalid votes is falling as turnout increases. It can be seen that this happens in rural areas. It turns out that rural residents are smarter, more literate than city dwellers, and fill out their ballots more correctly? In fact, without mass campaigns of ballot spoiling, it suggests that there is a higher rate of falsification in rural areas. And fraudsters are known to add votes to only one or two parties, and completely forget to add a proportional number of invalid ones. 

The so-called "Corbulon method'a" relies on this principle. It is not yet implemented in our Laboratory, but you can already notice this dependence from the scattering diagrams.

For an example, here's выборы главы Чувашской Республики 2020 года. You can see that as turnout goes up, the invalid percentage drops, you can see that this is an area - outside of the cities. And - surprisingly yes? - The percentage of incumbents is rising. 

Methods for estimating invalid turnout are not particularly popular, and you have the opportunity to be a pioneer. See for yourself™!

For you, researchers:

The electoral data of all the elections from this article has been uploaded into the Lab . Now, you can see the elections with your own eyes™.

Electoral data of all the elections in this article is available in the Navigator for Elections and Datasets for download and independent analysis.