Kyrgyzstan unrest highlights ills of political clientelism

 

Source: abc.net

 

Hordes of outraged Kyrgyz citizens have spilled into the streets of Bishkek, overrunning several government buildings and springing a number of opposition figures from jail in the process. The protesters, armed with rocks, have been battling the police in close quarters, leaving one protester dead and some 500 others wounded.

The ongoing turmoil has set off an unexpected turn of events — the election commission has annulled the results of the elections, Prime Minister Kubatbek Boronov has resigned from office, and his post temporarily filled by Sadyr Zhaparov, one of the opposition figures released by protesters.

At the root of the unrest is political clientelism and its most common manifestation, vote-buying. The opposition is roiling with suspicions that the administration massively bought votes in the recent parliamentary elections. Although Kyrgyzstan is known to have one of the freer elections among the Central Asian countries, the recent incidents have revealed the ills of political patronage which has plagued the rocky history of the young republic.

In the 2017 presidential elections which installed current president Sooronbai Jeenbekov into power, for example, European observers noted massive vote buying. Although the observers cited the elections as a step towards being a full-fledged democracy for the ex-Soviet state, they emphasized the need to address the issue of political patronage squarely.

The parliamentary elections in 2015 was also marred by charges of vote buying.

Kyrgyzstan is just one of many democracies around the world which are grappling with the deleterious effects of political clientelism. Recently, charges of vote buying have hounded elections in Thailand, Indonesia, and Kenya, among others.

2016 Philippine elections free from fraud - forensics experts

Elections forensics experts Kirill Kalinin, a national fellow at the Hoover Institution, and Professor Allen Hicken of the University of Michigan have concluded in a study that the contested 2016 Philippine general elections was free from fraud.

A paper titled “Using Election Forensics to Detect Election Fraud in the Philippine Elections, 2016,” revealed its key findings that the Philippine 2016 elections were relatively clean.

This study used the tools of election forensics to investigate charges of electoral fraud in the Philippine national elections of 2026.

“We focused on digit tests, finite mixture model and its equivalents. We pay particular attention to the measurement of stolen votes and geographic allocation of election fraud across national elections. We then focus on Marcos v. Robredo court case, which helps us to validate some of our research findings for the vice-presidential election,” the paper said.

It will be recalled that defeated vice-presidential candidate Ferdinand Marcos, Jr. had filed an electoral protest against the winner Vice President Ma. Leonor Robredo for alleged fraud. Although the Presidential Electoral Tribunal, composed of Supreme Court justices and tasked to decide on electoral disputes involving the two top elective positions, has yet to issue a formal ruling, it commented last year that its recount showed Robredo increasing her lead.

The study further said that even though there is some limited evidence suggesting the presence of election fraud, “their effect on the electoral outcome for the national races is insignificant.”

Election forensics is an emergent discipline which employs a diverse set of statistical tools such as Benford’s Law and other techniques similar to those employed to detect financial fraud, to analyze electoral data for pattern deviations which could suggest fraud.

According to the Institute of International Education (IIE), which is at the forefront of the new field, “numbers that humans have manipulated present patterns that are unlikely to occur if produced by a natural process—such as free and fair elections or normal commercial transactions.”

“These deviations suggest either that the numbers were intentionally altered or that other factors—such as a range of normal strategic voting practices—influenced the electoral results. The greater the number of statistical tests that identify patterns that deviate from what is expected to naturally occur, the more likely that the deviation results from fraud rather than legal strategic voting.”