 the protesters are right evidence suggests more election fraud in last week s elections in armenia since last week s  presidential elections february 18 in armenia  there have been  protests around the country  alleging widespread election fraud the presidential campaign was certainly eventful with one candidate going on a hunger strike and another being shot nonfatally the officially reported electoral returns came as a surprise to many the americanborn raffi hovannisian from the oppositional heritage party got 37 percent of the votes considering that in last year s parliamentary elections the party got only 38 percent of the seats this can be considered quite a feat many questions arise one of which concerns the extent of election fraud in the 2013 elections compared with last year s parliamentary elections i find that there are indications of more fraud in last week s elections first examining indications of outright fabrication i note a suspicious deviation from the expected uniform distribution in the vote counts for the ruling party in 2013 there is no such pattern in the 2012 data supporting the hypothesis that there was more fraud in 2013 in the absence of manipulation of vote totals the last digit should follow a uniform distribution of 10 percent in each of the 9 digit categories the vertical bars in the graph beber scacco 2012 the deviation from uniform is significant at the 1 percent level in the 2013 elections while nonsignificant in 2012  p value 981  there is anecdotal evidence of fraud from domestic election observers like the crowdsourcing platform  iditordorg  there are only four incidents of calculation errors or falsification constituting 1 percent of the 390 incident reports that were categorized actually the most frequently occurring types of incidents reported where either intimidation 11 percent or vote buying 10 percent fraud forensics based on digittests would not be able to capture such phenomena for the latter type of electoral manipulation we can graph turnout as a kernel density plot to detect anomalies a kernel plot is a nonparametric estimation of the probability density function of a random variable such a smoothing of the distribution helps us spot irregularities compared with the expected normal distribution examining the plots visually reveal an unnatural hump at the righthand tail as we would expect if there was ballot stuffing or other blatant forms of fraud that would increase turnout the hump is certainly more articulated in 2013 compared to 2012 again suggesting that there was more fraud in 2013 in a context where authorities claim that there was no fraud and the opposition alleges widespread fraud such forensics tools can be helpful as a piece of evidence these are only diagnostic tools though and should be interpreted with caution other organizations have put out similar analyses for instance  policy forum armenia pfa   it remains to be seen whether the citizens of armenia overcome the  wellknown collectiveaction problem  of whether or not to protest who knows the spring might come early to armenia this year see the original article here   