Generally, electoral fraud is a topic that people don't like to address.
It's a mechanism of psychological self-preservation.
After all, if we learn about electoral fraud,
then ideally that would require us to take some kind of action.
But we would rather not take any such action.
It might not even be possible to take any such action.
So it's better to not take any notice and just say that everything is fine.
How's that, not to take any notice?
Well, just that one doesn't want to internalize the information that our government stays in power by rigging votes.
If you feel like that, it's normal and common.
But one does need to be aware of the situation, at least because it's a reflection of our history
and a demonstration of how Putinism was established.
The graphs that we will examine today
tell what's happening today better than could big volumes of books.
And even if we can't do anything about it now,
and the entirety of the administrative machinery recognizes obviously rigged elections as real,
it doesn't mean that it will be the same tomorrow.
Now is a very convenient time to talk about it.
On the 1st of July, we witnessed the dirtiest vote in all of Russia's history.
22 million rigged votes were cast for Yes.
By the way, we have opened a service on my website,
where you can check the 1st of July voting outcome in your district
and see whether it is anomalous or not.
The link is in the description and in the first comment.
Also, another insidious thing is to say in advance, that...
well, obviously votes are tampered with. Why find that surprising? That would be naive.
When you do that, you the outrage after the fact.
That is, when people expect to be cheated,
they are not outraged when it actually happens.
They take it as something ordinary.
That is also extremely harmful.
One needs to continue to be appalled at electoral fraud each time that it happens,
since taking them as everyday events can only make then an ordinary part of our lives.
Today, we recall the history of fraud in Russian elections.
Were they always of this scale?
Is fraud somehow innate to our officials?
To make this video, I've asked the mathematician Sergey Shpilkin
for graphs for all elections since the start of publication of all results from individual districts.
If you have watched the evening news, I have already touched on this subject there,
but I decided to make this separate video to make it better and more easily shareable.
Lets start!
First, just a few words about theory, though likely you've already heard about it, but I'll just summarize it.
This could be new to some viewers.
Any collection of many small events, making up a statistical distribution,
will obey a normal distribution.
Events with average outcomes will be the majority.
The further you get from the average, the fewer events.
Lets look at this in the example of IQ tests. Here's the picture.
If you give everyone an IQ test,
then the majority will have an average IQ.
The further you go from the average, the fewer people you'll find.
Very few people will have extremely high and extremely low IQ. That's a normal distribution.
If the graph suddenly goes up at this end
and you find many more super-geniuses than people with already high IQ
and roughly the same number as people with average IQ,
then something is fishy with your numbers.
And if it happens that all these super-geniuses live in Tatarstan,
it means that in Tatarstan no actual IQ testing even took place;
they just recorded that everyone is a super-genius and sent you the results,
which you included in the statistics.
Yes, it's that simple!
In the modern world, with big open datasets and huge computational power at hand for anyone,
rigged votes can be exposed in double-quick time.
One doesn't even need any video surveillance footage or reports from observers, to conclude that an election has been tampered with.
We will learn of the tampering literally on the morning after the vote.
And moreover, we can also glean the tamper-free result.
What does the graph of a normal distribution of votes in an honest election look like?
Here's for example Spain.
A perfect normal distribution.
Voter turnout on the horizontal axis, number of votes on the vertical.
Average districts are the majority.
Exceptional ones, with very low and very high turnout, are the minority.
The rise and fall of the graph are exactly the same. Here's another graph, from France.
These are presidential elections.
One can find lots of examples like this and they'll all look exactly the same.
No other noticeable peaks except for the main one.
The official turnout falls right in the middle of the graph.
Definitely, no districts with 100% turnout and 100% support for the establishment candidate.
Graphs like these signify that election commissions are honestly counting the votes in the bins.
In contrast, the graph from our latest vote looks like this (2020 Russian constitutional amendments referendum).
Starting from bottom left, everything is normal up to 42%.
That's the real turnout.
And then you get god knows what.
Peaks at round percentages obviously stand out.
The election commissions simply wrote in nicely rounded turnouts.
And the higher the turnout, the more Yes votes. This graph clearly spells out tampering.
The commissions got instructions from on high, and wrote the required percentage.
But was it always like this in Russia?
Lets examine the first round of presidential elections in 1996.
For some reason, in the public consciousness, has taken root the opinion that that election was rigged;
even Dmitry Medvedev mentioned this at some point.
However, the data says the opposite.
Boris Yeltsin was then president. He was not a KGB alum.
Stealthily tricking everyone was not part of his political strategy.
The campaign was very tough for him,
but any tampering with that election was very very minor, that's for one,
and for another, to the extent that it existed, it as directed against Yeltsin.
How could that have happened?
Tampering against a sitting president?
Back then, we had real federalism.
Political opponents were not jailed. Governors were elected and not appointed.
Many governors belonged to the CPRF (Communist Party of the Russian Federation) and some voting anomalies did occur there, but very few;
and of course, there were no... there was no significant portion of districts
with 100% turnout and 100% support for Yeltsin or Zyuganov.
Have a look at the right side of the graph. Each dot is a (district) election commission.
The Yeltsin votes are closely clustered, votes for other candidates basically as well.
Zyuganov's results do actually rise slightly as a function of anomalous turnout towards 90%.
These are exactly those anomalous districts; they are very few.
Now, the second round: Yeltsin vs Zyuganov.
Perfect graphs.
Again, some suspicion of tampering against Yeltsin, but on a very small scale.
Actually detecting tampering on such small scales with this model
is not obviously correct.
That is, here we can see massive tampering. On very small scales, it's hard to tell.
As is easy to see on the graph, the vote tally was honest:
nobody interfered with the election commissions,
nobody passed to them instructions to write in a high turnout with a high percentage for Yeltsin.
This graph is best compared with our most recent vote,
because there were also only two options and they are simply most analogous visually.
Have a look at the comparison: no comments necessary.
The results of the 1st of July vote are obviously fake.
These peaks at the round percentages are especially ridiculous.
This is clearly seen from the DECs (District Election Commissions) graphs. Here they are now.
In the presidential election, all DECs are clustered,
while the reported turnout (here it is) passes right through the center of the densely clustered districts.
Moving away from the reported turnout line, the density drops: fewer and fewer districts where the turnout significantly differs from the average.
In 2020, those DECs that counted honestly are clustered, around 42% of turnout.
Actually this particular area, around this turnout, reproduces a normal distribution in all elections,
including those that we are comparing with.
But further, there appears a giant tail that confidently rises toward a cluster around 100% turnout and 100% result for Yes.
That is, they simply forged... massively forged ballots for Yes.
Can you also see these lines of higher clustering, these red ones at the top?
They are very clear.
Here's one, visible at the top at 95%, this one here.
Lower we see more, around 85%.
That's just a huge number of commissions that simply wrote in a result of 95%.
They had different turnouts, all with a 95% result, which is why they all fall on this line here.
On the presidential election graph, there's nothing similar:
the whole distribution is random; nothing falls on round percentages.
It's important to understand: forging data in a way that would look nice on such a graph is impossible.
Passing on a target of 95% from on high, that's possible, which will show up on the graph as we can see it here.
But to engineer the results of 100 000 election commissions to look like a normal distribution, that's impossible, no way.
So mathematics clearly proves to us this:
the result of the 2020 vote is completely fabricated,
while the votes in 1996 were tallied honestly.
So, lets get back to the full graph from '96,
to have a look at it and lets go to later elections in Russia.
So when did vote tampering begin, and how?
Here are the Duma elections from '99.
Putin had only just become prime minister.
The country is controlled by Yeltsin and his team.
And, as you can see, no substantial anomalies in evidence.
Very small anomalies, to the tune of 300 000 votes,
can be noted in favor of the Fatherland-All Russia bloc, which will later become United Russia.
300 000 fabricated votes now just seem like child's play, when we've seen the appearance of 22 million fabricated votes.
See this little bit here, here's the graph, the Fatherland-All Russia bloc is here in purple.
You can see jump slightly towards high turnout.
Next, (presidential) elections from 2000.
Then, Putin was on the ballot. We already see a small, but clear, fabrication of votes.
Look, the graph on the left has an unusual decrease and small peaks,
while on the right appears the "comet's tail", with many districts close to the result of 100% and 100% turnout.
meaning that everyone came out and voted for Putin.
These are fabrications; they are still quite small.
Putin was nudged over the 50% mark, to avoid a second round.
Officially, he received 52.83%.
Removing the anomalous districts, he gets approximately 50%, well maybe 50.8%.
It's hard to tell at such precision; perhaps even 49.9%.
Here we have the very beginning of Putinism, with fairly mild tampering.
Next follow the 2003 Duma elections.
Putinism starts to solidify, but it's still just the beginning.
Election tampering gradually take on a massive scale.
United Russia receives 3 800 000 fabricated votes.
You can see the appearance of anomalies after 75% turnout,
with certain progression towards results of 100% with 100% turnout.
The tail of United Russia's comet gets bigger and bolder.
It was exactly then, on those elections, that liberals left the Duma.
Though president Putin actually made a congratulatory phone call to Yavlinsky (leader of the liberal Yabloko party),
the results then coming in from these districts with 100% turnout and 100% support for United Russia
nevertheless made it so that Yabloko fell below the 5% barrier.
Notice that there are yet no pronounced peaks
nor are there lines of DECs at round percentages.
Tough results are fabricated, the vertical hierarchy, which would simply pass down the on high instructions about the needed result,
is not yet built in any of the regions.
Next, the 2004 presidential elections. These were difficult elections for the establishment.
Putin's base was yet to solidify; the propaganda machine did not work then as it does now.
Techniques of opponent selection are first employed. Here this was accomplished by strong suggestion:
CPRF put forward a "grey apparatchik", while LDPR put forward Zhirinovsky's former driver.
Tampering of much greater scale: 8 200 000 votes were fabricated for Putin.
The cluster of districts with nearly 100% turnout and results of nearly 100% is solidifying.
The comet's tail, on the left graph, keeps growing.
But there's still a ways to go to 2020,
but the number of districts, where the results are not counted but simply fabricated, keeps growing.
Pronounced peaks at round percentages, 80%, 85%, 90%, 95% turnouts, start appearing.
There appear also regions with electoral anomalies, where the votes are not even counted,
rather a 95% turnout with 95% for Putin is simply recorded.
But that was still much less of than than there is today.
This was the last election overseen by Alexander Veshnyakov, the then president of the Central Election Commission (CEC),
who was considered generally trustworthy and oversaw all elections since '95.
As we have seen, in '96 and '99, the elections overseen by him were honest, at least their tallying was.
But at this point he is sensationally not reappointed to the new board of the Central Election Commission.
However, the board now features the then unknown LDPR representative Vladimir Churov.
Dear friends, that's it.
And here already are the 2007 Duma elections. They saw an overstepping of all bounds.
The second peak, the one closer to 100% turnout, is now the same size of the main one, the one at the true turnout.
The number of anomalous ballots constitutes 12 000 000.
That results in almost a quarter of all votes for United Russia,
which, without batting an eyelid at this, becomes the majority party.
Next, the 2008 (presidential) elections.
Medvedev, the weak successor, requires a boost from a landslide result and they fabricate 14 000 000 votes in his favor.
That is already more than a quarter of all votes for Medvedev.
Here also, quite clearly on the right graph,
show not only the cluster close to 100%,
but also those lines of targeted results at round percentages, which we saw in 2020.
Have a look, here at 80%, 85%, 90%, 95% and then there at 96%, 97% and 98%.
That's just shameful, and it could never happen organically.
Such clusters around round percentages occur
only if the Election Commission, when reporting its result, is aiming at a target percentage.
Next, the Duma elections, in 2011.
A complete fairytale!
Now a whole third of United Russia's result was never cast into the voting bins, it was simply fabricated.
Instead of the real 34% for United Russia, a result of 50% is announced.
Because of the tampering, Yabloko does not make it into the Duma.
Such obvious tampering enrages the Muscovites.
In Moscow, it is at its worst. We will return to Moscow later separately.
The illegitimacy of the election is obvious to everyone.
Thousands of demonstrators on Bolotnaya Square and Sakharov Avenue demand honest elections.
People demand the resignation of the CEC board and to redo the Duma elections.
This is the first time that the public becomes outraged by the tampering.
As a result of these demonstrations a political liberalization does take place.
Frightened, the establishment starts takes steps toward a more democratic system:
gubernatorial elections return, which two years later will see the participation of one of the leaders of the opposition, Alexei Navalny.
But, despite the obvious electoral fraud, the establishment retains control.
The makeup of the Duma remains the same.
This Duma will adopt the most repressive laws in the history of Russia:
huge fines and jail time for participating in demonstrations,
the anti-Magnitsky law forbidding foreign adoptions from Russian orphanages,
the "foreign agent" law.
It is this parliament's support that enables the annexation of Crimea and the start of the war in Ukraine.
Lets have one more look at the fairytale-like graph with fabrications
and compare it with the 1999 Duma elections, before the beginning of Putinism.
Here's a comparison of one of the graph.
No anomalies in '99,
except well small amount of tampering in favor of the Fatherland-All Russia bloc,
which is still at its moderate heights.
Huge amounts of tampering in 2011, but it is best seen here, comparing the graphs of DECs, represented as individual dots.
In '99, everything is clustered and understandable,
while in 2011 there is the huge comet's tail in the region of districts with 100% turnout and results of 100% for United Russia.
By the way, if it seems to you that fabrications from Tatarstan, Tuva or Chechnya are none of your concern,
since you live in Moscow,
you are mistaken.
The numbers of parliamentary seats are eventually proportional to the total number of reported votes.
Imagine, you've got an electoral district. Say 3000 are eligible to vote there.
The true turnout in Moscow constitutes well suppose about 40%.
30% have voted for United Russia.
That is, your district supplied 360 votes to United Russia, and 840 votes to other parties.
Your parliament would have consisted of 30% United Russia and of 70% other parties.
But then arrive the fabricated votes from Kemerovo.
A similar district, 3000 votes, and all go to United Russia.
There you see it, full turnout and all for United Russia.
And so, in your common parliament with Kemerovo, United Russia gets 80% of the seats,
while all other parties only 20%, with many not passing the threshold.
It's quite likely that the parties that you have voted for don't pass the threshold exactly due to these... to such regions.
To compensate for one tampered-with district from such regions, you need 10 districts in Moscow.
Well, lets go on.
The 2012 presidential election. Significant tampering in favor of Putin, but they are less noticeable than in 2011.
The establishment, scared by the demonstrations, put the breaks on the vote rigging machine.
Moscow, about which later, actually becomes a model of honest tallying.
But not St Petersburg, it had fewer demonstrations.
Election rigging there continues to this day. It has been going on for a long time... and is still happening.
Duma in 2016 is the next graph.
The scale of the tampering is greater than in the 2011 elections.
Again, almost a third of votes for United Russia are simply fabricated.
Instead of 38%, a result of 54% is announced. But no protests follow.
Moscow has been purged of the tampering, in other regions and cities no one really objects against such fabrications,
at least not to the point of coming out to protest.
Next, the 2018 presidential election.
Only 10 million votes are fabricated, just a bit less than in the 2016 Duma elections.
But with 56 million real votes for Putin, these fabrications don't look so significant,
though such an election of course cannot be recognized as legitimate
and any honest election commission would not have accepted its result.
Well, and finally in 2020, an absolute record.
All stops pulled out, any veils discarded.
Nobody is interested in the real votes anymore and massive tampering takes places even in Moscow.
In St Petersburg, the result is flipped, from a No victory to a Yes victory at 77%.
There was an exit-poll, which showed 65% for No on the 1st of July, the main voting day,
which was completely representative.
It was this voting day that was promoted in ads
and it is clear that, if a majority (a rather dominant one) of those who came out on that day voted No,
that most likely the total result would be closer to that,
but the result in St Petersburg is flipped.
Now, lets have a look at how protests influence election tampering and whether fraud is somehow innate to our election commissions members;
can they really not do otherwise?
Here are the 2011 elections in Moscow.
Obvious tampering:
no clustering,
you can see the target DEC lines, the higher the turnout, the higher the result for United Russia.
These are fabrications.
The protests started. People did not like that.
And here's 2012. An election only four months later.
The composition of the election commissions is the same, but there is a perfect normal distribution.
Not even a hint of tampering.
And now, a year later, 2013. The mayoral election.
One of the opposition leaders is allowed on the ballot, at that that time, Alexei Navalny.
The tally is crystal clear. No tampering, literally not even in a single district.
And that's with the same commissions, so with no changes, except for the instructions from on high.
Before it was fabricate, and now don't fabricate.
And that's the history of election tampering in Russia.
After the publication of these graphs on the 1st of July, Ella Pamfilova, CEC's Deputy Chairperson Bulaev and Sergey Kiriyenko
started attacking both Shpilkin and mathematics.
Bulaev said that election results don't follow mathematical rules;
he has experience stretching back to the '70 and all of this is bullshit,
and that he'd like to see Shpilkin try his own hand in running in an election... Bulaev.
Kiriyenko called the methodology pseudoscientific,
while Pamfilova said that results from Western countries also don't give such graphs.
Of course, that's complete bullshit.
Right at the start, I showed a Spanish election, here where you see an ideal bell curve,
and the one from France, where it's the same.
Well, we even looked at our own elections, where the tallying was honest, and the same thing happens.
The 2013 mayoral election in Moscow. Here's the graph.
The 2012 presidential election, in Moscow; yes this graph is just Moscow.
They decided not to tamper then because of protests and here's the result.
The 1996 presidential election, the first round and here the second round.
Mathematics does work; when you're not cheating, you get a normal distribution.
But when you do cheat, you get peaks at high percentages
and immediately, the next day, the fabricated votes are revealed.
Here, look at the 2011 elections, or the 2016 ones.
And of course our 2020 vote, the dirtiest vote in the entire history of Russian elections.
Without a shadow of a doubt, that it has been tampered with.
This story tells us a few things.
First, election rigging is a conscious strategy of the Putin administration to remain in power.
Without it, it would not have such an overwhelming mandate, absolutely no way.
United Russia would have lost the majority in 2011 and would have become a minority party.
The liberals would not have left the Duma in 2003,
and with their presence everything would have unfolded differently.
Second, the tampering is the result of a vertical hierarchy.
The election commissions fabricate results when instructed from on high.
As soon as the anti-tampering protests sprang up in Moscow,
the establishment immediately decided to no longer tamper with elections in Moscow.
And just three months later, the same commissions, the same school teachers tallied everything honestly.
A year later, the repeated the same trick, and so on until 2020;
the 1st of July saw massive fabrications return to Moscow.
Though they did return on a much smaller scale.
Where there were independent commission personnel, who didn't strike and came to do their jobs,
there were no fabrications and no discarding of votes.
So, what is one to do with all this?
For a start, register and share the information,
don't accept the status quo, when the moment to protest comes.
But most importantly, be active:
sign up to be on the election commissions, observe,
again actually get to be on the commissions,
participate in elections in any capacity.
The normal tools for restoring justice,
like the courts or honest law enforcement
or an honest Central Election Commission, which would nullify fraudulent elections,
are currently not available to us.
Of course, no honest Election Commission would ever accept the 1st of July, 2020 vote as legitimate;
one simply cannot fabricate 22 million ballots
and then, like nothing happened, proclaim that everything is normal and claim a triumph.
And of course, any honest court would nullify such results.
But at the moment, all these institutions are controlled by the power hierarchy built by Putin
and none of them can do anything of the sort.
That's bad, but rather recently in our history we were under a totally different political regime,
where elections were definitely just a formality,
while the country was ruled by people officially elected by the single party congress.
The material, which I've recorded and well you've just watched,
could not be shared by me, except clandestinely.
And, had I been caught sharing this material,
I would have been officially convicted, according to the law about sharing anti-soviet propaganda.
The law described the following as a crime:
"agitation or propaganda carried on with the purpose of undermining of weakening the Soviet state."
Such actions were punishable by "deprivation of freedom for a period of from three to ten years, or exile for a period of from two to five years."
That's no Stalin-era remnant, these terms were sanctioned in 1984.
That regime seemed all-powerful, but it ended in three days.
One need not lose hope and decide that it's time to emigrate.
On the other hand, sharing information about what's going on is an obligation;
the more people are informed, the harder it is to cheat.
Until tomorrow!
1996-1: minor fabrications against Yeltsin
1996-2: minor fabrications against Yeltsin
1999: 260 000 votes fabricated for Fatherland-All Russia bloc
2000: 3 million votes fabricated for Putin
2003: 4 million votes fabricated for United Russia
2004: 8 million votes fabricated for Putin
2007: 12 million votes fabricated for United Russia
2008: 14 million votes fabricated for Medvedev
2011: 14 million votes fabricated for United Russia
2012: 10 million votes fabricated for Putin
2016: 12 million votes fabricated for United Russia
2018: 10 million votes fabricated for Putin
2020: 22 million votes fabricated in support of constitutional amendments
The history of election tampering in Russia.
1996-1: minor fabrications against Yeltsin 1996-2: minor fabrications against Yeltsin
1999: 260 000 votes fabricated for Fatherland-All Russia bloc
2000: 3 million votes fabricated for Putin 2003: 4 million votes fabricated for United Russia
2004: 8 million votes fabricated for Putin 2007: 12 million votes fabricated for United Russia
2008: 14 million votes fabricated for Medvedev 2011: 14 million votes fabricated for United Russia
--- demonstrations "For honest elections" in Moscow ---
2012: 10 million votes fabricated for Putin 2016: 12 million votes fabricated for United Russia
2018: 10 million votes fabricated for Putin 2020: 22 million votes fabricated in support of constitutional amendments