ANOTHER Russian election, another victory for Vladimir Putin. With almost all of the ballots counted, United Russia, Mr Putin’s party, appears to have won the legislative election on September 18th, with about 54% of the vote. The result was so predictable that most Russians did not bother to visit their polling station: turnout dropped to a record low of 47.8%. One reason for such apathy is the widely held belief that participating in Russian elections will not change the status quo because they are fraudulent.

Such thinking seems to have solid foundations, according to numbers crunched in a recent paper by Dmitri Kobak, Sergey Shpilkin and Maxim Pschenichnikov, three statisticians. They argued that if election results were being manipulated, humans’ natural attraction to round numbers would show up in the statistics. Therefore, there would likely be a disproportionately high number of polling stations reporting the winner’s percentage of the vote as a multiple of five or ten.

They looked at seven Russian elections and found that, in recent years, this was indeed the case. The number of Russians registered at polling stations where the share of voters supporting Mr Putin or his party was a multiple of ten was much higher than it would have been if left to chance. The data imply that ballots were being stuffed in a particularly lazy and noticeable way, though of course they cannot prove it. Russia-watchers will be waiting to see if this year the Kremlin’s cronies have made more of an effort to cover their tracks.

Correction (September 19th): A previous version of this piece said that turnout in the election was 47%. We neglected the decimal point; it was actually 47.8%. This has been amended.

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