This is Not a Surprise

There now appear to be some strong statistical indications of ballot manipulation in the latest Turkish elections:

A statistical study of the voting patterns in Turkey’s November 1 general election found strong evidence that is “consistent with widespread voting manipulation".

That was the conclusion of a paper released by assistant professor Erik Meyersson at Stockholm School of Economics entitled “Digit Tests and the Peculiar Election Dynamics of Turkey’s November Elections", and released on November 4.

The result of the elections came as a shock as the Justice and Development Party (AKP) of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s defied the almost universal polling consensus and won some 9 percentage points more than expected – just enough to rule alone, but not quite a constitutional majority.

Some have speculated that faced with external and internal instability Turks have turned to a strong leader to see them through uncertain times in what might be called a “Sultan complex". However, drilling down into the voting statistics Meyersson concludes that Sunday’s result was not so much an AKP victory as a defeat for the ultra-nationalist Nationalist Action Party (MHP).

“As in last elections, much of the change in voting seems to have occurred among nationalist as well as Kurdish voters, with this election seeing a difference of priority among them. Whereas June’s election was HDP’s to win, this one appears to have been to a large extent the nationalist MHP’s to lose,” Meyersson said in his paper.

Meyersson concentrated on the differences between June’s election and this one, where that time AKP was the recipient of the shock and had its majority grip on power broken after HDP entered parliament for the first time.

“Plotting the difference in vote share between November and June, the AKP’s gain appears to come predominantly at the expense of MHP. In some other cases, the vote swing seems to be driven by voters in Kurdish provinces leaving the other main opposition party pro-Kurdish and left-leaning Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP) for AKP,” says Meyersson.

………

The main statistical test the paper explores is the use of the so-called Benford’s Law that is a widespread statistical technique for spotting cheating in polls and has a big body of academic literature behind it.

The way it works is simple: in a fair vote the last number of the final tally for each polling station should be randomly distributed. As humans are very bad at generating random numbers if the vote count has been tampered with then this randomness is destroyed and a discernable pattern emerges.


………


Meyersson’s study finds a very similar thing seems to have happened last weekend. The analysis was complicated by the fact that some ballots only produced 300-350 ballot papers, which is too small a number to be a good statistical sample. To get round this problem Meyersson decided to use the June vote as the basis of the comparison for the randomness of the last number – but that also assumes the summer’s vote was free and fair.

Those caveats aside, the results are striking. As the chart below of the frequency of each of the appearance of the numbers from 0-9 in the last place of the final tally clearly show there are too few zeros in the AKP party vote counts and too many for MHP.  The same is true for HDP, but the number of zeros at the end of the tally for Republican People’s Party (CHP) were the same in both elections and conforms to the Benford distribution above.


………


Meyersson’s study finds a very similar thing seems to have happened last weekend. The analysis was complicated by the fact that some ballots only produced 300-350 ballot papers, which is too small a number to be a good statistical sample. To get round this problem Meyersson decided to use the June vote as the basis of the comparison for the randomness of the last number – but that also assumes the summer’s vote was free and fair.

Those caveats aside, the results are striking. As the chart below of the frequency of each of the appearance of the numbers from 0-9 in the last place of the final tally clearly show there are too few zeros in the AKP party vote counts and too many for MHP.  The same is true for HDP, but the number of zeros at the end of the tally for Republican People’s Party (CHP) were the same in both elections and conforms to the Benford distribution above.

This explains a lot.

It also means that Erdogan is likely to use even more extreme measures to remain in power the next time around.

I rather expect that we won't see him leave office absent some sort of coup activity.

Not a pleasant thought for a NATO ally.