On Saturday, December 10, 20,000 people gathered for a mass rally in Moscow; they were protesting alleged fraud in the December 4 parliamentary elections. Some of the allegations were mathematical in nature.

The Washington Post reports: 

"Obviously, he [Putin] doesn’t agree with Gauss,” one commenter wrote, referring to pioneering mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss, who lived 200 years ago. Disenchanted Russians argue that United Russia’s reported election results are so improbable as to violate Gauss’s groundbreaking work on statistics.

The article does not say what exactly the problem with the election result is and what work of Gauss is relevant. It only says that he lived 200 years ago. This should be enough to trigger an alert, as science has advanced a bit over the past 200 years . . .

I decided to take a closer look at the allegations. 

In the piece entitled “Mathematics against Election Committee: Gauss against Churov [the head of the committee],” a blogger complains that the distribution of the percentage of the vote for the United Russia Party among election precincts is “non-Gaussian.” This, he writes, is evidence of election fraud because Gaussian distribution arises “always . . . in every case, when there is not one factor, but many”:

Whatever is measured in large quantities. Make a plot of how many millions of men in the country have the height of 165, 170, 175 centimeters and so on—and you will also get a symmetric bell curve with the top corresponding to the most typical height in the country. 

If you do not know what the Gaussian distribution is, the blogger gave a good example: distribution of people by height. Most men are of average height; the greater the deviation from the average, the smaller the number of men. There are some very tall people, but none of them is twice the average height.

The heights of people are definitely Gaussian-distributed, but what about incomes? They are influenced by many factors and measured in large quantities. However, they are distributed as if most people were 170 centimeters tall, but often you would meet a three-meter guy. Rarely you would encounter a five-meter man, more rarely—a ten-meter one. Sometime, from a distance, you would see a hundred-meter person. And there would be several hundred-kilometer chaps in the country. This distribution is very far from Gaussian, but for some reason it does not attract the wrath of our mathematicians, or our Berezovskies. 

The banner says “We don’t trust Churov [the head of Election committee]! We trust Gauss."

In a recent article in Significance, I argued that since there are so many distributions in nature and society that are not Gaussian, there is no reason to believe that vote distributions must be. To support this conclusion, I gave a mathematical model, which produces a non-Gaussian distribution of the percent of votes for a party among election precincts. 

A commentator challenged me to show non-Gaussian distributions in U.S. elections.

I took up the challenge.

I decided to look at 2008 Republican primaries (mostly because this was the last election I voted in). The primaries differ from national elections, as different states hold votes on different dates. Moreover, some candidate drop out during the process. All of this complicates the analysis. But 21 states do hold elections on the same day, “Super Tuesday.” Since almost half of the nation votes on this day, the elections function like a national primary.

The most complete elections results database I could find is Dave Leip's “Atlas of U.S. Presidential Elections.” It does not have precinct-level results for the election in question, but its results are listed by county for 19 out of 21 Super Tuesday states (the exceptions being Alaska and North Dakota). I computed the distribution of the percentage of the vote for four major candidates among 1,162 counties.

As you can see in Figure 1, Mike Huckabee's distribution has two equal peaks at 15 and 35 percent. The drop between peaks is half the peaks' height. John McCain's distribution has one peak at 35 percent and another at 80 percent. Between these peaks, the distribution drops almost to zero. Mitt Romney has one peak at 25 percent and another at 90 percent. Ron Paul has an exponential distribution.

Apparently, American elections also “violate Gauss’s groundbreaking work on statistics.” (The least you could say is that these distributions are no more “Gaussian” than the distributions observed in Russian elections ( Figure 2).) 

Figure 1. The results of the 2008 Republican presidential primaries in 19 Super Tuesday states. The distribution of the percentage of the votes for four major candidates among 1,162 counties. I used a 5 percent bin. All counties with the vote for the candidate of no more than 5 percent went to the first “5 percent” bin. Those with the vote of more than 5 percent but no more than 10 percent went to the second “10 percent” bin, and so on.

Figure 2. 2011 Russian parliamentary elections. The distribution of the percentage of the votes for parties among election precincts. The x-axis shows percentage of votes for the party; the y-axis—the number of precincts. The bin is 0.5 percent. The Brown line is for United Russia, Red—Communist party, Green—Russian United Democratic Party "Yabloko," Black—Liberal Democratic Party, Blue—A Just Russia. This picture traveled across hundreds of blogs during the past couple of weeks.

Another issue brought up by the bloggers is that there are spurious peaks at 50 percent and other multiples of 5 (see Figure 2). But when you examine precinct-level results, you notice that in many precincts, very few people voted, as little as one person in some of them (!). When two, four, six, eight, or 10 people vote, you can easily get a result of 50 percent, and never 49 or 51 percent.

The database mentioned above has precinct-level statistics for the 2000 U.S. presidential elections in California. In Figure 3, I plotted the distributions of the percentages of the vote among election precincts. You can see obvious peaks at 50 percent in both Al Gore's and George W. Bush's distributions. There are also less pronounced peaks at 20, 25, 60, and 75 percent. However, there are other obvious peaks at 34 percent (1/3) and 67 percent (2/3). These, obviously came from the precincts where three (or another small divisible of three) people voted. (I do not see such peaks in Russian election results. This problem requires additional study.)

Note also, that the distributions in Figure 3 are far from Gaussian. If there is something resembling a bell curve in Figure 3, this is a combined curve made up of Gore's distribution below 50 percent and Bush's distribution above 50 percent. If I use the same methods of “proof” used by the bloggers to allege large-scale fraud in the Russian elections, I can “prove” that Gore stole millions of votes from Bush in California! Surely, the Washington Post would want to report on this! Of course, such “proofs” are nonsense, since the distributions should not necessarily be Gaussian in the first place.

It's worth pointing out that my study does not prove that the recent Russian elections were honest. It does, however, prove that in making the case that the Russian elections were fake, the bloggers used fake math.

Figure 3. Results of 2000 presidential elections in California. The distribution of the percentage of the vote for three main candidates among 21,970 precincts. I used a 1 percent bin.

Not in vain is Russia heir to the traditions of Byzantium; intrigue, secret diplomacy and espionage are integral to the Third Rome’s strategic culture. Over the past decade Vladimir Putin has proven a consummate practitioner of statecraft in this fashion, as well as an able defender of the national interest. Yet where is he leading Russia? The answer remains a mystery. His formidable will and predisposition to action are impressive, but only in the service of a higher principle will these gifts signify greatness.

Barring any extraordinary surprises or disasters, Putin will again be president of the Russian Federation by spring of next year. His liberal protégé, Dmitry Medvedev, is slated for a return to the premier’s seat (now occupied by VVP, as he is referred to in Moscow), thereby flipping the leadership “tandem” back to its natural state. Titles in contemporary politics carry limited meaning. It’s clear that Putin was and is the Gosudar’, Russia’s ruler; he’s a Byzantine emperor, Petersburg technocrat and KGB veteran all at once. And his operating methods today still reflect the formative years he spent in Soviet intelligence.

After a series of pogroms tore through Russia in 1886, the young philosopher Vladimir Soloviev would exercise his prophetic impulse. Neither a slave to social fashions nor a stranger to controversy, Soloviev was a friend to the Jews out of sincerity rather than any calculation. Two years prior, he had published an article asserting the intertwined destinies of Christendom and Jewry as part of his greater vision of a “free theocracy.”¹And so in the pogroms’ aftermath, Soloviev wrote in a letter to his acquaintance, the Talmudic scholar Feivel Getz:

What are we to do with this disaster? Let pious Jews pray intensely to God, that He set Russia’s fate in the hands of religious and also sensible and brave men, who would want and could dare to do good for both peoples².

Such a man would be granted to Russia, if only for a time. As the Romanovs’ empire was swept into a ruinous war with Japan and the 1905 Revolution, Pyotr Arkadievich Stolypin would stand against the maelstrom. Stolypin was ruthlessly suppressing rebellion as governor of Saratov oblast when he was called by Nicholas II to national duty. Within months, the new prime minister would proceed to re-establish order in Russia and undertake challenging political, economic and agricultural reforms. Just as Soloviev had hoped but would never see, Stolypin also attempted to improve the acrimonious Russian-Jewish relationship at the level of nationalities policy. This premature effort, however, was unlikely to satisfy any interested party, much less radicals of any persuasion.

Stolypin would resign in March of 1911 from the fractious and chaotic Duma after the failure of his land-reform bill. His peace in this world would be short-lived, though; he was assassinated at the Kiev Opera House on September 14 in the presence of the emperor. Upon being shot, Stolypin stood and declared his willingness to die for the Tsar, whom he then blessed before collapsing. In a eulogy for the fallen, the conservative monarchist Lev Tikhomirov would praise his nobility and strength of heart, all of which he devoted to the service of his fatherland:

The blood of his ancestors spoke in him, and his soul was deeply Russian and Christian. He believed in God as the Lord may grant belief to the servants before His altar…In such a way did he believe in Russia, and in this we can only admire him. And from this faith he drew vast power³.

Who today remembers the once-mighty Warsaw Pact? Not the punk rock group, of course, but the Soviet Bloc’s formidable answer to U.S.-led NATO. Twenty years have now passed since it was peacefully dismantled in what was a finishing touch on the collapse of Communist power and the end of the Cold War. Yet unlike the Warsaw Pact, the North Atlantic alliance did not disband; it steadily pushed east toward an exhausted Russia and then metastasized. Like any successful multinational, NATO went global.

Largely through its role in NATO, the United States had applied generations of resources and manpower in containing the Soviet threat, and its investment paid off. America’s triumph against such a dangerous peer competitor was total and unambiguous- the one state that spanned the length of Eurasia had fractured into fifteen. The End of History was at hand, and with Marxist management practices discredited only one contender for humanity’s future remained. A democratic-capitalist world system, already organized in the post-war years, could now be fully implemented under Washington’s benevolent aegis.

One Cold War veteran who can well recall the course of this vast transformation is Robert Gates. After all, he operated behind the scenes and at the highest levels of power during critical moments of the U.S.-Soviet struggle. A career CIA analyst, Gates was National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski’s staff aide when the Carter Administration launched a covert action program to aid the Afghan mujahideen in 1979. The White House signed off on the order six months before the Politburo in Moscow committed to an invasion of its southern neighbor, along with a disastrous occupation that would cripple the USSR.

Western traditionalists might feel an affinity for certain aspects of Vladimir Putin’s drive to restore the Russian state. Such sentiments are often justified. Putin is unapologetic in his defense of actual national interests and has deftly reclaimed the Kremlin’s sphere of influence in Eurasia. In the August 2008 war with Georgia over South Ossetia, he delivered the Russian response to Washington’s creation of the Kosovo client state and stood firmly against American globalism. Open Society NGOs were expelled from Russia on his orders, and oligarchic influence curtailed, if only to an extent. The current Prime Minister has also initiated pronatalist campaigns to reverse post-Soviet demographic freefall and strengthened the Orthodox Church’s social profile. While Putin may be credited for carrying out these policies, other aspects of his rule betray the ideological indifference of a technocrat and myopic opportunism.

Putin’s liberal tendencies are first and foremost evident in his chosen successor to the presidency, Dmitry Medvedev. Medvedev might style himself a reformer in the spirit of Tsar-Liberator Alexander II, but his pretensions fall flat. The president’s worldview is shaped by the same empty liberalism that has arrested Russia’s post-Communist cultural recovery from the 1990s to today. His closest advisers are virtually indistinguishable from the official front-men of financial elites in the West—their modernization projects are intended to strengthen the primacy of the oligarchs, and they hail mass immigration from the Caucasus and Central Asia as a disposable labor resource and political dependency. In the typically bourgeois formula of Calvin Coolidge, the business of Russia Inc. is business—production, consumption and profit. For the global civilization that Russians are entreated to join, there is no value higher.

Part of me wants to feel sorry for this man, who seems to be descending into dementia. I become less sympathetic when I remind myself just how close he came to becoming president and how he still seeks to influence directly Washington's foreign policy.  

John McCain: Putin and Hu Should Watch Out

By Lucy Madison

CBS News

February 13, 2011

(CBS)  Arizona Sen. John McCain predicted on Sunday that the recent governmental overthrow in Egypt would likely spur similar movements throughout the world, and warned foreign leaders in countries like China and Russia that they might be "a little less secure" of their power in light of recent events.

"I don't think this is confined to the Middle East, just as we believe that human rights are universal," said McCain, in an interview with CBS' "Face the Nation."

"These winds of change that are blowing, I think I would be a little less cocky in the Kremlin with my KGB cronies today if I were [Russian Prime Minister] Vladimir Putin," he warned. "I would be a little less secure in the seaside resort that [Chinese] President Hu and a few men who govern and decide the fate of 1.3 billion people."

McCain, the ranking member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, said he could not yet determine the extent to which Egypt's revolution would impact the rest of the Middle East, but expressed concerns about how similar events might play out in surrounding countries.

"The Egyptian people are educated, they're sophisticated. They are not a country, in all due respect, one like Yemen where there are stark contradictions [existing] within that country," McCain said.

He also said he worried that, in countries like Iran and Syria, protests would be met with harsh governmental responses.

"The Syrians obviously and the Iranians will be much more harsh if demonstrations take place in their country," he said. "And the message to the Iranians is, let your people have peaceful demonstrations and let's have democracy in Iran, Syria and other countries, which are [not only] not our friends but are in many ways our enemies."

The Arizona Republican called the Egyptian revolution a "repudiation of al Qaeda," and praised the peaceful nature of the protests demanding Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak's ouster.

"The Egyptians helped us in the fight against al Qaeda," he said. "This revolution is a direct repudiation of al Qaeda, who believe that the only way you bring about change is through violence."

He added that while Eypt was "incredibly important in the Israeli-Palestinian peace process," Israel might have "reason for concern" as a result of Mubarak's loss of power in Egypt.

"Whatever government is going to come into power is not going to have a close relationship that they [had] with Mubarak - let's just make that assumption," he said. "Then the question is, what will be the nature of that relationship, and will there be places like Gaza that are flash points anyway that will cause the likelihood or possibility of conflict?"

Regardless, McCain said he thought the spread of anti-governmental demonstrations - even in traditional allies like Egypt - would ultimately benefit the United States.

"This is spreading and it's great news," he said. "It is fraught with uncertainty. But some of these things were bound to happen, number one. Number two is, it's good for everything we believe in. We've got to believe in the long run that countries that have free and open societies are going to be natural allies of ours over time." 

What's most ironic is that when the neocons & co. wax rapturously about the latest "democracy" wave that will soon threaten their autocratic enemies, they seem oblivious to the reality that the United States, too, is in serious danger of facing a mass protest from its underclass. If the welfare checks bounce, or the currency hyperinflates, and hundreds of thousands of welfare-dependent, undocumented, and otherwise down-and-out Blacks and Latinos march on public facilities demanding "democracy" and "regime change," would the senile senator from Arizona do anything but call for the national guard to open fire?    

Russia rises from its knees, only to stand again at a crossroads. The country must choose its guiding idea, the transcendent value that will define the fate of its culture and people. Under President Dmitry Medvedev, the liberal segments of the ruling elite are again emboldened. They speak ceaselessly of modernizing- not only industries but the population at large, to form a “civil society” in accordance with Western norms. All of this is ostensibly for competitive advantage at the international level. For Russia not to fall behind, Medvedev’s advisors intimate, it must fully integrate with the U.S.-led market order.

Such is the assertion. It is readily apparent that Russia must diversify an economy dependent on energy revenues, yet what the Kremlin liberals propose is no more than the imposition of the latest variant of Western materialism in the manner of the Bolsheviks and post-Soviet “shock therapists”. Men like Igor Yurgens, head of the Institute of Contemporary Development and the acknowledged architect of the modernization schemes, have shown little but contempt for the actual, historical Russian nation. They welcome the massive influx of Central Asians and Caucasians into Moscow and other cities as cheap labor, upholding EU-style multiculturalism as a model for imitation. These policies inevitably generate further friction between Russians and ethnic groups known (in some cases not unfairly) for their criminal tendencies.

The January 24^th terrorist bombing at Domodedovo Airport in Moscow serves as a reminder of why Russia throughout its history has dwelt in a state of mobilization. The vast spaces of the Eurasian heartland have concealed a wide array of adversaries, from Poland’s Winged Hussars and the Grande Armée to Turkic nomads and rebellious Caucasian mountaineers. War is a reality that manifests itself here with depressing regularity, and it has been firmly impressed in the Russian historical memory. From fields of battle to the dark recesses of the soul, Russia more than other cultures is defined by struggle.

And so the carnage persists into our brave new twenty-first century; this time a suicide bomber killed 35 innocents during the hours of Monday-morning travel. The attack was most likely carried out by a cell of the Caucasus Emirate, a jihadist umbrella organization. It was calculated to further destabilize the republics of the North Caucasus and possibly drive inter-ethnic tensions in Russia’s major cities to a breaking point. Retribution, as Prime Minister Vladimir Putin remarked, will be inevitable. But in calibrating a response, the Kremlin is placed in an extraordinarily difficult position, as it must attend to a situation that could quickly spin out of control.

In the last few months of 2010, the United States has intensified its air campaign over the Pashtun tribal lands that lie astride a mountainous and poorly defined Afghan-Pakistan border. In the course of 102 days, 58 strikes against Taliban and Al-Qaeda operatives (as well as a high but unknown number of innocents) were carried out by the Air Force and CIA’s fleet of unmanned aerial vehicles.

Jihadists and civilians alike are incinerated by Hellfire missiles without much notice from the media, and American soldiers and marines who fall in combat can expect little better. Yet one death connected to the war in the Hindu Kush certainly did garner attention in Washington: that of Richard Holbrooke, the Department of State’s Special Representative on Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Holbrooke, responsible for diplomatic coordination of the ongoing conflict, died from a ruptured aorta on December 13^th. Since then the press and the Obama administration have unleashed torrents of praise for this “giant of American diplomacy”. But perhaps the most fitting tribute to the man has been the ever-expanding role of killer drones in the execution of policy, as reported from Pakistan’s northwest. Despite his earlier experiences in Vietnam, Richard Holbrooke came to believe firmly in redemption through coercive air power. In bombing there is progress; in bombing shall we find peace.

I'm wary of offering any unequivocal endorsement of "New START," the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty with Russia that was ratified on Wednesday, or anything else that comes out of the American foreign policy-making establishment. That said, the knee-jerk reaction against it by the neoconservatives and their evangelical and conservative-yahoo underlings--who give their undying and unconditional support to a small country in the Middle East and yet view a great White, Christian nation in the east as a perpetual enemy--tells you all you need to know about "conservatism" in America. 

"Patroon" writes at Conservative Heritage Times, 

From the election returns a few weeks ago it is obvious from the the exit polling to the demographic breakdowns to the actual results themselves that the GOP has been established as the white, Christian party whether they like it or not.  They can display all the tokens they want but we all know who is on the dollar bill.

So given this fact, why on earth do many Republican politicians still regard Russia as the same enemy they were back in the Cold War?  Why do they stare into the faces of the white Russians, whose golden domes of the Cathedral of Christ the Savior glistens in the Moscow sun, and only see the enemy.

Regardless of the merits of the START treaty, the opposition to it in the context of Russian relations is just baffling. Neocon opposition I can understand but not the opposition of everyone else on the Right.

Here’s a nation which can be a valuable ally, which suffers the same malignancy of Islamic terrorism and has sen seen many dead from it and is a nation which has similar historical traits as the U.S. in some areas.

Daniel Larison at Eunomia debunks a lot of arguments against a simple nuclear proliferation treaty and Pat Buchanan wonders why the GOP is risking a new cold war? But cynically I wonder if the Russians were Dispensationalists  instead of Orthodox Christians, would their be such push back from the GOP.  Such “other” Christians, particularly in Middle East, were offered no protection by the Bush Administration either in Iraq or in Israel (certainly not getting anything from the Obama Administration) despite the troubles U.S. foreign pyolic caused them. Orthodox Christians in Serbia and Macedonia were abandoned in the face of Albanian irredentism.  Now Republicans in the Senate wish to do the same to another group of Orthodox Christians. I ‘d like to know the reasons why.

A commenter on the CHT blog recounts a meeting between British Prime Minister James Callahan and Soviet Premier Leonid Brezhnev in the late '70s. Brezhnev concluded the conference by remarking to his counterpart, "Mr. Prime Minister, there is only one important question facing us, and that is the question whether the white race will survive." This blunt phrase startled the prime minister and interpreter alike, who we're too caught up in Cold War vagaries and the class politics of the Labour Party to think of something as basic as preserving one's bio-cultural heritage.

Russians have been far wiser than Anglo-Saxons in this regard. Mikhail Gorbachev took up Brezhnev's call and envisioned a geopolitics centered around "Our Common European Home," Europe from Brittany to the Bering, a racial bloc in which the United States and Canada would play a role. (Due to mass immigration into the two North American powers, this latter aspect is quickly becoming inconceivable.)

How different would our foreign policy be if we made it on the basis of what really matters?