The Influence of Territorial Heterogeneity and Falsifications on Integral Electoral Indices

Available information of Russian public elections provides many opportunities for the analysis of distributions of various electoral indices. For example, the distribution of the number of polling station in turnout intervals (turnout polling station distribution) is often close to normal; it would be natural to expect if the rules by which voters make decisions on the participation of the elections are about the same for all voters. In practice it appears that turnout polling station distribution sometimes deviates significantly from the normal , and the differences between such distributions for different elections do not depend on the type of election and may occur for a brief period of time between two elections. These differences can be explained by the territorial heterogeneity in the electoral behavior of voters. However, the question arises why such territorial heterogeneity manifested in Moscow, but do not appear, for example, in Yekaterinburg. Also in Moscow, these “heterogeneity” appear very irregularly. The observed turnout polling station distribution has good explanation with model of ballot stuffing - cramming votes to one of the contenders (party or candidate). This model describes the observed behavior of not only the turnout polling station distribution, but also the behavior of other electoral indicators, for example - the distribution of votes. The article describes the results of a computer simulation of certain rules and vote counting. The results of simulations are compared with the actual electoral statistics.

computer simulation, electoral indices, voting results, voter turnout distribution, ballot-rigging