So I’ve stumbled across this thing called Shpilkin method, a statistical model that pretends to quantity electoral fraud. I haven’t found the precise model because all I get is media talking about it, there isn’t even a Wikipedia article for this. Upon primary investigation I found multiple sketchy things.
- It seems that the model is based on analysing voter turnout variation, however turnout is known to be affected by other factors such as people only caring about the biggest election
- I haven’t seen the model applied an compared to any other country than Russia, what if it would detect similar voter fraud in the “democratic west”?
- The media covering this is really bad, the top results are radio free europe and some neolib pro nato french news outlet.
- Mr Shpilkin apparently got rewards from some irrelevant “Liberal Front” and also got put on the list of foreign interference personalities by Russia
All I know about statistics is that you can make numbers say whatever you want. Is there anyone with education in the field that could evaluate how valid this whole thing is?
I used a t-test to compare the election results for Putin to his approval ratings and found no significant difference, although a sample size of only 5 probably isn’t very good for making conclusions.