Election fraud detection in Armenia and in Flanders
Last week, a tweet by the Dutch political scientist, Armen Hakhverdian (@hakhverdian), pointed to an interesting blog post from Fredrik M Sjoberg, a Postdoctoral Scholar at Columbia University – The Harriman Institute. It's a guest post on The Monkey Cage dealing with the recent election in Armenia and the (alleged) election fraud. One of the things he did was a very simple test. He did a $\chi^2$-test based on the assumption that: In the absence of manipulation of vote totals the last digit should follow a uniform distribution of 10 percent in each of the 0-9 digit categories He did that for the ruling party at the polling station level both for 2012 (no fraud allegations) and 2013 (fraud allegations). The results are summarized by the graph below (copied from the original blog post). The $\chi^2$-test for 2013 turns out to be significant at the 0.1 percent level, but non-significant in 2012 ($p$-value = 0.981). Apart from the fact that I'm always a bit worried when