Democracy isn't all what it's cracked up to be.

[Franco]

http://www.nature.com/news/democracy-isn-t-all-it-is-cracked-up-to-be-1.9925

“The people who cast the votes decide nothing,” Joseph Stalin is reputed to have said. “The people who count them decide everything.” A paper uploaded to a preprint server this month suggests that little has changed in Russia.

Peter Klimek, a complex-systems scientist at the Medical University of Vienna, and his colleagues say that the 2011 election for the Duma (the Russian lower house), won by Vladimir Putin’s United Russia party with 49% of the votes, shows a clear statistical signature of ballot-rigging1.

This is not a new accusation. Some, such as Russian physicist Sergey Shpilkin, have claimed that Russian voting statistics show suspicious peaks at multiples of 5% or 10%, as though ballot officials have simply assigned rounded proportions of votes to meet predetermined figures. And last December, The Wall Street Journal conducted its own analysis of the election statistics, which led political scientists at the Universities of Michigan and Chicago to concur that the data showed potential signs of fraud.

 

[mkrnhr]

Unfortunately, Nature (the journal) is very biased and I personally consider it as pure propaganda. I read it every month or so and its editorial line is more than obvious. It's corrupted science to the extreme.

 

[Franco]

And this true probably for any big publications, however I don't detect any propaganda in this piece, do you?

 

[mkrnhr]

Why the election process would be suspicious onlt in Russia, and not in the USA, in France, etc. ?
Nature(c) finds problems only in a few select countries: Russia, China, Venezuela, Iran, etc.

 

[Franco]

True, I noticed that, the US was mentioned but in a different context.

The way I read the article was more a stab at democracy than singling out specific countries but I can see how it could be seen that way.

"Furthermore, analysis of voting statistics suggests that, regardless of the voting system, political choices are not free and independent (as most definitions of democracy pretend), but partly the collective result of peer influence. That is one — although not the only — explanation of why some voting statistics don't follow a Gaussian distribution, but instead show a relationship called a power law3, 4. Klimek and his colleagues find less extreme, but still significant, deviations from Gaussian statistics in their analysis of ‘unrigged’ elections1. "

I assume they are trying to paint the countries above in the rigged elections and that other countries in fair elections.

 

[thevenusian]

You might be interested in checking this out:

http://cassiopaea.org/forum/index.php/topic,19153.msg184724.html#msg184724

According to some researchers the problems with vote counting are not new, and have been going on for a long time.

 

[Hildegarda]

Yes, the election fraud in Russia during last year's election was so blatant, crude, and in-your-face, that it sparked widespread outrage. The amazing thing to many people, however, was that even having the opportunity for such obvious fraud the ruling party couldn't fake the approval of the people (couldn't assign themselves, say, 70% of the votes instead of 49%), they were that out of touch with reality.

 

[Franco]

Yes, the election fraud in Russia during last year's election was so blatant, crude, and in-your-face, that it sparked widespread outrage. The amazing thing to many people, however, was that even having the opportunity for such obvious fraud the ruling party couldn't fake the approval of the people (couldn't assign themselves, say, 70% of the votes instead of 49%), they were that out of touch with reality.

I seem to notice a lot more protesting in Russia in the news lately, do you think Russians are starting to be less scared of their government and lashing out?

 

[Hildegarda]

in recent times, they weren't so much scared as they were apathetic. "Nothing can be done anyway" etc. This feeling of apathy is now gone. Nobody expected things to start moving this far, this fast. Also, it's the middle class that are being vocal about their dissatisfaction, the people who are perceived as setting the social norm.

 

[Approaching Infinity]

Why the election process would be suspicious onlt in Russia, and not in the USA, in France, etc. ?
Nature(c) finds problems only in a few select countries: Russia, China, Venezuela, Iran, etc.

This reminds me of a quote from Evidence of Revision. Good propaganda isn't necessarily lies. It presents the message the propagandists want to give by presenting a limited number of truths and leaving out a whole lot of data that might give a totally different interpretation. So, Nature could be telling the truth about vote rigging in Russia (as Hildegarda mentions), but by leaving out obvious vote rigging in the States, they give the impression that it is only "those countries" who engage in such dastardly deeds. They lie by telling the truth.

 

[bngenoh]

They lie by telling the truth.

Genius isn't it, brings to mind this quote "A tacticians greatest ability is control over what is false and what is real" this is my paraphrase anyways.

 

[Redrock12]

They lie by telling the truth.

Or by not telling the whole truth.