INTRODUCTION

This volume's genesis is the late Alexander Sobyanin's (1993, 1994) attempt to develop methods for detecting fraud in Russian elections. Motivated by the desire to see a transition to a legitimate democracy, Sobyanin's immediate concern was Russia's 1993 constitutional referendum and his belief that the vote had been fraudulently augmented to ensure a turnout exceeding the 50 percent threshold required for ratification of a document tailored to President Boris Yeltsin's taste. Despite Sobyanin's impressive credentials as a scientist, two of this volume's coauthors disagreed among themselves and with him as to the validity of his methods. Nevertheless, it was evident that developing ways to detect election fraud in the former Soviet Union using official data was essential, if only because comprehensive and objective on-the-ground monitoring of elections would be a problem for the foreseeable future.

That fraud existed in some form in Russia and other parts of the former Soviet Union seemed self-evident. As one of us commented with tongue in cheek, “if you had an election, you had fraud. The only question is: How much?