Who Stole What in Russia’s December 1993 Elections

erious allegations of fraud have been made with respect to Russia’s first competitive, party-based parliamentary election in December 1993. Although similar allegations have been made with respect to the 1995 parliamentary and 1996 presidential elections, those that concern 1993 are especially problematic. The assertion that over nine million ballots were fraudulently cast and that the turnout threshold of 50 percent required to validate the constitutional referendum was in fact not surpassed bring into question the legitimacy of Russia’s present constitution. Moreover, if the same methods for detecting fraud are to be applied in subsequent elections, and if those methods are flawed, inappropriate conclusions about the legitimacy of future elections may result. In this article, we look at the primary method used to infer massive fraud in December 1993, and we conclude that as presently developed, it is inadequate to the task at hand. That method, which looks at the relationship between turnout and the share of the electorate voting for one party or position versus another, is subject to a number of methodological pitfalls, including aggregation error and the possibility that unobserved variables correlate with both turnout and support so as to render any relationship indeterminate. We do not dispute the possibility that fraud on the alleged scale did in fact occur; our conclusion here is simply that we cannot verify either 9.2 million fraudulent ballots or a turnout rate less than 50 percent.