Researchers out voter fraud by using statistical methods...

Researchers analyzed election results in Russia and found evidence of voter fraud.

(Phys.org)—A team of Austrian researchers has applied a new statistical method in looking at elections in various countries and the ways that some of them might be influenced by fraud, and have found, as they describe in their paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, that two recent elections stood out as likely suspect, one in Uganda and one in Russia. Traditionally, to detect voter fraud, statisticians have looked at voting patterns that appear to adhere to a certain constant (ten, hundred, etc) indicating that whole blocks of votes were cast for a certain candidate. The downside to such a method is that the best it can offer is an indication that there might have been some irregularities in an election, but nothing definitive, which is far too little to go on to spout claims of fraud. To get around that problem the new team instead focused on areas of regional voting. The idea is that if a certain small region has a very high voter turnout and virtually all of the votes from that area are for just one candidate, it's probably due to some serious ballet stuffing (and likely destruction of votes for the other party) which of course tends to skew the results. If a sufficient number of regions are able to show such numbers, it becomes possible to alter the outcome of the election, and that is what the researchers found when looking at the elections held in Uganda last year and in Russia earlier this year. Read more here.