Meddling in the Russian elections.



I voted for Zhirinovsky on March 18, 2018.

Have said all there is to say on that in these articles:

With that out of the way, let’s move on to the bigger picture.

PS. Note that I will also have separate posts on the results in Crimea and Chechnya, which were particularly interesting and important as pertains to understanding Russia.

Election Results

Main sources:

Results as of: 99.94% of ballots processed (17:15 19.03.2018 MSK)

. RESULTS AK Predictions Baburin 0.65% 0.8% Grudinin 11.77% 9.7% Zhirinovsky 5.65% 7.8% Putin 76.69% 76.2% Sobchak 1.68% 2.0% Suraykin 0.68% 0.5% Titov 0.76% 0.5% Yavlinsky 1.05% 1.3% Turnout 67.98% 68.0%

Not to particularly brag, but my predictions [see others] were pretty good, and considerably better than both the average [Putin = 68.7%] and the VCIOM predictions market [Putin = 71.8%].

So perhaps I do know a few things about Russia after all.

Who Won?

Well, Putin did, overwhelmingly so, with 76.7% of the vote versus 63.6% in 2012.

Moreover, thanks in part to a state-sponsored rock the vote campaign, turnout exceeded 2012 levels by a few percentage points, exceeding both pessimistic expectations and dealing a heavy reputational blow to Navalny, who staked his bets on an elections boycott.

Critically, Putin managed all this with much less electoral fraud than in 2012 [more details below].

This is very important not just from a moral/ethical viewpoint, but from a cynical game theoretical one as well:

Why does the Kremlin still bother to falsify when it could enjoy greater legitimacy by keeping them clean? There are academic theories that electoral fraud, even when victory is assured, is still “rational” from the POV of an authoritarian ruler. Falsification helps you signal such overwhelming dominance that it effectively demoralizes the opposition {Simpser 2013}. But this can backfire (see the Moscow protests in 2011), and besides, there are very real benefits even for authoritarian polities to keep their elections clean – namely, to credibly signal regime strength and to receive reliable information on their true level of political support. These benefits are especially germane for dictators with “rich financial resources, disciplinary ruling organizations, and weak opposition” {Higashijima 2014). Russia satisfies all three conditions. Allow me to advance a more banal thesis: Electoral fraud in Russia is largely a function of regional corruption as opposed to a conscious game theoretic strategy, and one which the Kremlin is as little interest in addressing as corruption in its own elite ranks (post-2011 Moscow is the only prominent exception to this).

So I am pleasantly surprised by the improvements.

Putin enjoyed a very broad-based surge in support, including amongst the intellectual elites: For instance, Putin went from being beaten 45%-30% by Prokhorov [liberal] in 2012 at the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology, this time he won 46%, beating out the combined totals of the two liberals, Sobchak and Yavlinsky, as well as of Grudinin.

Although my relative optimism on Zhirinovsky was not fully borne out, Grudinin and the Communists can be considered to have lost.

The Communist candidate’s share of the vote fell from 17.2% in 2012, or almost triple that of Zhirinovsky’s 6.2%, to just 11.8%, or just slightly more than double Zhirinovsky’s 5.7%.

This is the worst electoral performance of the KPRF in the Presidential Russia in all of post-Soviet history; even the non-entity Nikolay Kharitonov eked out 13.7% in 2004.

This is in the context of the Communists replacing the old warhorse Zyuganov, who was consistently trailing Zhirinovsky in the polls by almost one-to-two, to field a non-KPRF member and strawberry minigarch who appealed to some liberals (he was the only major candidate to whom Navalny has been respectful), small business owners, and even a few nationalists (was supposed by a few marginal national democrats such as Yury Boldyrev and Andrey Savelev, although the latter disavowed him after the commies refused to let his followers fly their imperial banner)*.

It’s also not like Grudinin scared away the hardcore Marxists – the purists had the nut job Suraykin with his “Ten Stalinist Blows Against Capitalism and American Imperialism” program, who ended up with less than 1%.

This was not of course a great performance by Zhirinovsky either – voters did appreciate him bullyciding Xenia Sobchak off the debate stage quite as much as I did.

But surprisingly, it was not nearly as bad as Grudinin’s performance. The fact is that Zhirinovsky traditionally does much worse than his party – he got 5.7%, which is exactly half of what the LDPR got in 2016, when it nearly caught up to the KPRF, which got 13.6%. However, Grudinin with his 11.8% actually did worse than the KPRF; the only other electoral cycle this had happened in was in 2011-12, when the KPRF unexpectedly became a huge magnet for protest votes.

Grudinin needed to revive the party’s fortunes and rescue it from its death spiral; he himself may have expected to do better, promising to shave his mustache in an interview with Russian YouTube sensation Yury Dud’ if he failed to achieve at least 15%. Just days after not getting elected, Grudinin began to go back on his promises, stating that he would now only follow through on the deal if Dud’ was to openly state that the elections were fair.

There is no point in discussing the liberals Yavlinsky, Sobchak, let alone the other three, because they do not constitute even halfway serious political entities.

However, the biggest loser to them all is the guy who was most prominent by his absence: Navalny.

Putin’s much higher base popularity relative to 2012, electorally certified, coupled with the relatively much cleaner nature of this election, means that Navalny will now have an exceedingly difficult time getting people out into the streets. I no longer even expect a repetition of the ~10,000 strong protests of 2017, let alone the ~100,000 strong protests of 2011-12. I now more than half suspect that Navalny will start fading away into the margins, like in 2013-2016.

Electoral Fraud

Western journalists (Leonid Bershidsky excepted) are predictably moronic on this matter:

Which is why instead of subscribing to The Daily Telegraph, you read me for free – though feel free to change that: http://akarlin.com/donations/

Exit polls are a good test for the absence of massive fraud (assuming the pollsters are not cooking the figures too).

As we can see, they matched the actual results [Putin = 76.7%] pretty well.

FOM exit poll [Putin = 73.3%]:

VCIOM exit poll [Putin = 73.9]:

This doesn’t necessarily prove that there was no fraud, as I explained in what is perhaps the most comprehensive popular survey on this topic: Measuring Churov’s Beard: The Mathematics of Russian Election Fraud

Sergey Shpilkin popularized the use of statistics to estimate Russian electoral fraud in the 2011-12 electoral cycle, the theory being that votes for candidates relative to turnout must be proportional to each other. (This assumption does not always hold; for instance, in Russia’s case, rural voters who tend to vote for Putin, also tend to have higher turnout, so this method tends to overestimate fraud. However, excessive deviations are not statistically plausible).

Here are the result of this analysis for the current elections.

For comparison, here is a similar graph on the 2011 Duma elections, in which United Russia got around 8-10% more than it “should have” and which marked an all time peak in Russian electoral fraud.

One can see even with the naked eye that there was far less fraud in 2018 than in 2011, though it is still much worse than in the 1990s. This is in fact the fairest Russian election since 2004.

I will have a couple of separate articles on the implications with respect to two regions, Chechnya and Crimea, in the following days.

Dmitry Kobak, another statistician, estimates that real turnout was 61-62% [official = 68.0%] and that Putin’s real share of the vote was 74-75% [official = 76.7%].

Although he, like most who statistically expose Russian electoral fraud, is anti-Putin, he disputes Navalny’s claim that real turnout was 55%. He suspects a sampling issue.

FWIW, I agree. First, this is what I found in 2012, for the banal reason that election observers were more likely to be stationed in richer, more SWPL, and consequently more oppositionist/anti-Putin places. Second, as someone who called for an elections boycott – and failed hard – Navalny has an especially strong interest in claiming that turnout was much lower than the official figures.

***

* This outreach into non-Communist groups was reflected in performance across age groups. Traditionally, as I have often written [1, 2, 3], Zyuganov/KPRF did much better with the elderly, whereas support for Zhirinovsky/LDPR grew amongst younger cohorts in a diametrically opposite manner. Grudinin managed to partially upend this pattern: According to WCIOM exit polls, he was actually about equally strong amongst both 18-24 year olds [10.2%] and 60+ year olds [9.1%], versus Zhirinovsky, who was competitive with Grudinin amongst youth [8.3%] and the middle-aged, but preserved his traditional very weak performance with the elderly [4.0%]. Even so, this outreach was ultimately weak, and involved the KPRF retreating from its core principles to boot.