INDICATORS

We emphasize again that the indicators of fraud we detail in this volume are but a part of the forensic evidence that can be brought to bear on an overall assessment of an election's legitimacy. They can be used to confirm what observers and commentators might tell us or give direction to subsequent follow-up analyses by way of suggesting what voting districts or regions yield suspicious patterns and who those patterns favor. We also want to emphasize that our concern is finding ways to detect election irregularities in official returns that are simultaneously consistent with what we know a priori about the election under investigation. With respect to Russia in particular we have, for instance, the rayon in the ethnic republic of Tatarstan in 2004 in which of forty-one polling stations, none reported turnout below 95 percent, none gave Putin less that 98 percent of the vote, and twenty-four reported 100 percent turnout and 100 percent of the vote for Putin. Either voters there were more careful in filling out their ballots than anywhere else on the planet, or their ballots were irrelevant to that rayon's official numbers.