Ukraine's 2007 parliamentary elections free and fair or fraud once again?

Problems of Post-Communism

Volumn 55, Issue 6, 2008, Pages 33-41

  Myagkov, Mikhail ^a   Ordeshook, Peter C ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF OREGON   (United States)

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EID: 58149214030     PISSN: 10758216     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.2753/PPC1075-8216550603     Document Type: Article

References (12)

1. If the SPU's 3 percent is added to the 88.58 percent of the vote won by Regions plus BYuT plus Our Ukraine plus CPU plus Litvyn's bloc, the total comes to 91.58 percent of those casting ballots for parties at or above the 3 percent threshold. Dividing 0.03 by 0.9158 and multiplying by 450 gives fourteen seats for the SPU. The Regions plus CPU share of the vote equals 39.76 percent. Multiplying 450 by 0.3976 and dividing by 0.9158 gives 195 seats.
2. Mikhail Myagkov, Peter C. Ordeshook, and Dimitry Shakin, "Fraud or Fairytales: Russia and Ukraine's Electoral Experience," Post-Soviet Affairs 21, no. 2 (April-June 2005): 91-131.
3. Idem, "The Disappearance of Fraud: The Forensics of Ukraine's 2006 Parliamentary Elections," Post-Soviet Affairs 23, no. 3 (July-September 2007): 218-39.
4. For an overview of attempts to detect and forestall fraud in general, see R. Michael Alvarez, Thad E. Hall, and Susan D, Hyde, eds., Election Fraud: Detecting and Deterring Electoral Manipulation (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2008).
5. For an earlier attempt at documenting and measuring fraud in Ukraine that takes advantage of the split parliamentary electoral system (half SMD and half party list PR) employed at the time, see Erik S. Herron and Paul E. Johnson, "It Doesn't Matter Who Votes, But Who Counts the Votes" (paper presented at the Midwest Political Science Association meeting, Chicago, April 2003) (http://web.ku.edu/~herron/elections/papers/fraud.pdf).
6. Data for this figure are taken from Myagkov, Ordeshook, and Shakhin, "Fraud or Fairytales."
7. The figures here use precinct-level returns after deleting the special polling stations with fewer than fifty registered voters. Thus, there are 2,477 observations for Donetsk and 1,496 for Luhansk.
8. Myagkov, Ordeshook, and Shakhin, "Fraud or Fairytales."
9. The number of precincts reporting a share of the eligible electorate in excess of 0.125 for the SPU is 368.
10. It is interesting to note that this estimate explains why votes had to be taken from regions: With fewer than 94,000 votes for BYuT in Donetsk, there simply was no other source from which votes could have been stolen without the fraud being self-evident.
11. Melvin Hinich, Valerii Khmelko, Marianna Klochko, and Peter C. Ordeshook, "A Coalition Lost, Then Found: A Spatial Analysis of Ukraine's 2006 and 2007 Parliamentary Elections," Post-Soviet Affairs 24, no. 1 (January-March 2008): 63-96.
12. Mikhail Myagkov and Peter C. Ordeshook, "Russian Elections: An Oxymoron of Democracy," working paper, California Institute of Technology (2008), www.ucis.pitt.edu/nceeer/2008-822-l l-Ordeshook.pdf.