PS 139: Analysis of the 2013 Armenian Presidential Election
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
PS 139: Analysis of the 2013 Armenian Presidential Election James Chang, Jerry Feng, Karthik Siva, Benjamin Wu April 18, 2014 Introduction Historical Background Armenia is a landlocked country located at the crossroads between Western Asia and Eastern Europe. It is a primarily mountainous country, bordered by Turkey to the west, Georgia to the north, the Nagorno- Karabakh Republic and Azerbaijan to the east, and Iran to the south. Up until the end of the 19th century, present-day Armenia was divided by the Ottoman and Russian empires. During World War I, Armenians living in the then-Ottoman Empire were exterminated in the Armenian Genocide, but the country finally gained independence in 1918. The First Republic of Armenia was surrounded by hostile countries who quickly ended its independence in 1920, and Armenia was absorbed by the Soviet Union quickly thereafter. The modern Republic of Armenia gained its independence in 1991 and has remained a unitary multi-party democracy. Ninety-six percent of the population speaks the Armenian language, while 76% also speaks Russian. For this reason, Armenia can be considered culturally homogeneous for the most part, and political parties are divided by gubernatorial ideology differences rather than racial ones. Government The current Armenian government is only 13 years old. Armenia is a representative democracy and places its president as the head of government and of the multi-party system. The Armenian presidential elections follow a simple majority rule vote in which a candidate must amass 50% of the total votes to win the presidency. In the case that multiple candidates run for office and no candidate amasses enough votes, a re-vote is held with the two most popular candidates from the first round. Presidential Elections Over the course of its history, Armenia has had three presidents. The first was Levon Ter-Petrosyan, who was was popularly elected the first President of the newly independent Republic of Armenia on October 16, 1991 and re-elected on September 22, 1996. After the resignation of his predecessor Levon Ter-Petrosyan, Robert Kocharyan was elected Armenia's second President on March 30, 1998, defeating his main rival, Karen Demirchyan, in an early presidential election marred by irregularities and violations by both sides, as reported by international electoral observers. Serzh Sargsyan, the Prime Minister of Armenia at the time and having President Kocharyan's backing, was viewed as the strongest contender for the presidency in the February 2008 presidential election and was elected in both the 2008 and 2013 presidential elections, amidst some accusations of fraud. Thus, in this paper we apply various statistical methods on a variety of aspects of precinct-level data for the 2008 and 2013 presidential elections in order to detect and classify any possible forms of fraud in either year. 1 The 2008 and 2013 Presidential Elections In both the 2008 and 2013 presidential elections, Serzh Sargsyan won by a large margin, garnering 52.89% of the votes in 2008 and 56.67% of the votes in 2013, whereas the runner-up in 2008, Levon Ter- Petrosyan won just 21.51% of the votes and in 2013, Raffi K. Hovhannisyan won 35.51% of the votes. The data in Tables 1 and 2 suggest that while in 2008, Ter-Petrosyan had a few closer contenders, namely Artur Baghdasaryan and Vahan Hovhannisyan, the 2013 election could essentially be viewed as a two-candidate election between Serzh Sargsyan and Raffi K. Hovhannisyan, as the third place candidate won approximately one-twentieth the number of votes as Hovhannisyan. Candidate Number of Votes Percent of Votes Sargsyan, Serzh 862369 52.89 Ter-Petrosyan, Levon 351222 21.51 Baghdasaryan, Artur 272427 16.68 Hovhannisyan, Vahan 100966 6.18 Manukyan, Vazgen 21075 1.29 Karapetyan, Tigran 9792 0.6 Geghamyan, Artashes 7524 0.46 Melikyan, Arman 4399 0.27 Harutyunyan, Aram 2892 0.18 Table 1. National election data for the 2008 Armenian presidential election won by Serzh Sargsyan with runner-up Levon Ter-Petrosyan. Candidate Number of Votes Percent of Votes Serzh Sargsyan 861155 56.67 Raffi K. Hovhannisyan 539691 35.51 Hrant Bagratyan 31643 2.08 Paruyr Hayrikyan 18096 1.19 Andrias Ghukasyan 8329 0.54 Vardan Sedrakyan 6210 0.41 Arman Melikyan 3516 0.23 Table 2. National election data for the 2013 Armenian presidential election won by Serzh Sargsyan with runner-up Raffi K. Hovhannisyan. Constituency Background The electorate of Armenia consists of 41 regional blocks (or constituencies) of varying size, illustrated in Figure 1. Each constituency is further divided into 20-50 precincts. Each constituency is assigned an arbitrary number from 1 to 41, and each precinct is numbered from 1 to the maximum number of precincts that exist within the constituency. For example, Precinct 35/1 is located in the Shirak constituency, within the Azatan region, where all precincts labelled 35/X are located in the Shirak constituency. The data, as provided by the Armenian Central Electoral Commission, contains information on the number of total valid votes, the number of electors, votes apportioned to each candidate during the election, and invalid ballots to precinct precision. Each precinct contains about 15-2200 electors (eligible voters). 2 Figure 1. Constituency map for Armenia in the 2013 presidential election. Benford's Law: Least Significant Digit Analysis To begin the search for fraud in the electoral process, we began with the simplest method of detection using Benford's Law. The idea of least significant digit analysis is that if precinct-level data was tampered with by directly changing the number of votes per candidate, then human error would tend to generate random numbers whose least significant digit would follow a nonuniform distribution. In the 2013 data, the distributions of least significant digits for the 5 candidates with the lowest number of total votes are heavily skewed to the left, as one might expect. On the precinct level, these candidates often received less than 1% of the votes; as a result, it should be expected that in many precincts they received as few as 2 or 3 votes. Therefore, the skewness of this data is not a valid basis for accusations of fraud. The two most popular candidates, Raffi Hovhannisyan and Serzh Sargsyan, received relatively uniform least significant digit distributions as shown in Figure 2, and there does not seem to be any significant conclusion we can draw from this analysis. 3 Figure 2. Benford's Law analysis for the precinct-level election data for the winner of the 2013 Armenian election, Serzh Sargsyan, and his runner-up, Raffi K. Hovhannisyan. We investigated the least significant digit distributions for the 2008 election as well, where Serzh Sargsyan was the victor as well. In general, there appears a moderate preference for polling stations to report a number ending with zero, regardless of the candidate, as shown in the histograms in Figures 3 and 4. However, this information alone is not indicative of any fraud in the election, and again it is likely that the third and fourth place candidates gained zero votes in a nonnegligible number of precincts. Again, there is little that we can conclude from this analysis. Figure 3. Benford's Law analysis for the precinct-level election data for top two candidates in the 2008 Armenian election, Serzh Sargsyan and Levon Ter-Petrosyan. 4 Figure 4. Benford's Law analysis for the precinct-level election data for third and fourth place candidates in the 2008 Armenian election, Artur Baghdasaryan and Vahan Hovhannisyan. Turnout Distribution While the simple distribution of turnout is not a true analysis, there is much we can learn from inspecting these histograms. Figure 5. Percent (of electorate) turnout distributions in the 2008 (top) and 2013 (bottom) Armenian presidential elections. 5 In a fair election, the number of people who arrive to vote is expected to be a Gaussian distribution, but from a simple inspection of Figure 5, it is obvious that the 2013 election turnout distribution is greatly skewed to the higher end. On the other hand, the 2008 turnout distribution is much closer to a normal distribution. However, as the incumbent Serzh was the favorite to win the 2013 election as well as the actual winner, there are no obvious reasons for turnout to drastically shift between the two election years, and so we expect that there was some extra activity that prompted the deviation in the 2013 distribution. At this moment, we can cautiously suggest that there may have been some kind of ballot stuffing, which would cause turnout levels in some precincts to appear higher than the true numbers, without creating a simple shift in a normal distribution. If there is ballot stuffing, we should then expect to see some anomalous patterns in a plot of turnout against number of votes. Winning Margin Analysis We next turn our attention to the distribution of winning margins. In the following plots in Figure 6, we have the average turnout per constituency minus 50% (for ease of viewing) and the winning margin (votes for Sargsyan minus votes for Hovhannisyan). Note that while the constituencies are numbered arbitrarily, we can see a correlation between these two variables that suggests that there is a loose relationship between turnout and the number of votes Sargsyan receives, reinforcing our already established notion that Sargsyan seems to be asymmetrically favored by high turnouts. Figure 6. Average turnout (minus 50%) and average winning margin between Serzh Sargsyana and Raffi K. Hov- hannisyan, with each bar representing an average over each of the 41 constituencies. 6 Turnout vs. Votes Here we try two types of scatter plots. The first is turnout as a percentage per precinct plotted against the percent of registered electors who voted for each candidate.