[Investigation] How AI proved Russia's 2018 presidential election was fixed
euobserver.com
Many of the Russian programmers who investigated the legitimacy of president Vladimir Putin's last election victory in 2018 have been forced to flee the country fearing prosecution, amid concerns over attempts to hold the country's electoral process accou...

Cross-posted from: https://feddit.de/post/10019763

In 2020, Revisor, a neural network-based election-monitoring software Revisor, analysed footage recorded at 1,238 polling stations in 29 Russian regions on polling day in 2018 in an attempt to retroactively uncover the electoral fraud widely believed to have taken place. Indeed, after counting votes and comparing them with the official turnout, the software found discrepancies in 11 regions so huge that it made it impossible for the election result to have been accurate, according to another Revisor creator, Vlad Matveyev.

“How can Putin be considered to have won if we don’t know how entire regions voted?” says Ivan Shukshin, one of Revisor’s creators.

  • aname@lemmy.one
    1·
    8 months ago

    How can they tell from the polling station results? Can you visually see what other person is voting just by looking at a video feed?

    • cygon@lemmy.world
      6·
      8 months ago

      The article says they used volunteers and AI to count the number of people who voted from video feeds:

      after counting votes and comparing them with the official turnout, the software found discrepancies in 11 regions so huge that it made it impossible for the election result to have been accurate

      based on volunteer analysis of video footage from 233 polling stations in 17 regions revealed a discrepancy in turnout equivalent to 81,731 voters. Based on election statistics, analyst Sergey Shpilkin estimated that 10 million additional votes had found their way into ballot boxes nationwide.

      So they have strong evidence for around 10 million forged votes, but not which party they were cast for. Then again, when you consider that all political parties except Putin’s come in below 10 million votes, the selection of who might have benefited from it becomes rather small :)