Electoral Fairytalism
An aggressor, a heavily armed terrorist, an authoritarian socialist, and a bloodthirsty tyrant from the Middle Ages — the desperate political creatures who scramble for reverse engineering
The fresh results of the German elections reminded me of a well-known saying:
"Democracy is a system in which parties lose elections. In Electoral Authoritarianism, opposition parties lose elections."
With a long-overdue obligation to provide an English version of my December article (originally in Russian on X.COM and The Moscow Times), I am now going to revisit the story of a system that could be called Electoral Fairytalism.
In such a system, through tyranny and repression, opposition parties have lost freedom, lives, and everything—except the numbers.
The Fall of the House of Asad
Math at large
It's hard to tear yourself away from the footage of political prisoners being released from the Sednaya prison in Syria. The terrifying walls. The emaciated people. The unhuman machinery of iron presses used to crush people. It is to crush people in the literal sense of the word, not the figurative or psychological one.
Inside Assad’s Prison
Rescuers entering the Sednaya military prison discovered red ropes once used for torture and executions. This image, captured after the prison’s liberation, reveals the brutal methods employed against detainees. Photo: Emin Sansar/Getty, The Telegraph.
There are demonstrated some ‘red ropes’ for torture you can't even believe in.
But there are things about the terrible Syrian dictatorship that anyone with a calculator doesn't need to believe and can check out independently.
After Assad fled Syria, everyone rushed to spit at his back, accusing him of being illegitimate. ‘Dictator’, “tyrant”, “usurper”.
But to prove that you're facing a usurper is not easy at all.
Self-incriminating announcement of victory
04/06/2014, Syrian Arab News Agency SANA via Wayback Machine. A regime so desperate to prove its strength that it broadcasts its fake “victory” with the subtlety of a confession.
Bashar al-Assad is known to be an officially elected president, elected by millions of Syrians in a fair and competitive election. Isn't he? Are there any critics with verifiable objections or hard evidence to the contrary?
It's a bit complicated to find objections when anyone who had objections and evidence ended up in the Sednaya prison.
The dictator had the power to throw in prison anyone, except for "the Queen of Sciences", as Dr. Gauss used to call Mathematics.
Among the methods to rig elections, there is the most disgusting one. It is used when the culprits are even unable to organise a “decent” fabrication on a large-scale level.
I refer to the method as ‘reverse engineering’, when the calculations are executed in the reverse order: the number of votes is obtained using a calculator as a result of the multiplication of the turnout and the predetermined outcome, then the result is rounded up to the whole voter, gets published, and after that, being divided by the turnout, is celebrated as the evidence of a honest victory. The conspirators get back what they started with: a pre-conceived target percentage.
There's a whole section dedicated to this method on our website Electoral.Graphics.
As the Lochard exchange principle states: “Every contact leaves a trace”. According to the famous criminologist, “It is impossible for a criminal to act, especially considering the intensity of a crime, without leaving traces of this presence”.
What gives away the criminals in this type of offence is their ignorance of mathematics and statistical analysis.
Since they set the target percents in a simple way, with an accuracy of hundredths or even tenths, it is not difficult to restore the course of their actions. You only need to look closely at how round fractions are in the published results.
It is practically impossible to get round fractions in honest voting. The theoretical probability of such an event is close to zero. It could be as low as one billionth, as I will show in the examples below. Moreover, you’ll see a video that visualises how unlikely an event with the probability of one billionth. My intention was to demonstrate its likelihood to those who, like me, have trouble understanding those infinitely small numbers.
But let's get back to the case of Bashar al-Assad.
So, who is Dr. Asad? The imposter or ‘blessed Arab leader, who is confident in his people's will’ - as the Speaker of the Syrian People's Assembly Mohammad Jihad al-Laham proclaimed when Assad "won" the 2014 presidential "election".
Ironically, it is the very declaration of victory that disproves the declaration of victory.
Let's take a closer look at the numbers accompanying these words of al-Laham.
Here they go.
Source of the official figures
A fragment from an English-language publication by the Syrian state agency SANA dated June 4, 2014, where the election results were first announced—featuring the infamous “round” numbers that became evidence of fabrication.
The numbers of
participants is 11,634,412
invalid ballots is 442,108
votes gained by Dr. Bashar Hafez al-Assad is 10,319,723
votes gained by Dr. Hassan Abdullah al-Nouri is 500,279
votes gained by Mr. Maher Abdul-Hafiz Hajjar is 372,301.
We don't need complicated Shpilkin’s diagrams and data for every precinct election commission, as in other methods of electoral forensics. We don't need an unprecedented analysis of the Georgian Dream's Gender Deviations, by which they were caught in 2024.
🧮 We can simply pick up a calculator and see for ourselves the mathematical fact that Basar Assad is a usurper.
Indeed, if we divide all the numbers by the number of voters who participated, we get improbably round fractions.
Table with predetermined results
The figures announced by the Syrian authorities after the 2014 election match the preassigned percentages down to the fourth decimal place — a direct mathematical indicator of fabrication.
These simpletons didn't even bother to think up hundredths of a percent, like other political con artists in this review. The Syrians limited themselves to tenths of a percent.
How improbable are those "improbable round fractions"?
The probability of such coincidences is extremely low. For example, to get such a row of zeros in a fair election for sure – as a statistician would have said ‘with an expected mathematical probability of 100%’ - you need to hold two hundred billion elections.
200,000,000,000 elections.
While there are many ways to calculate the probability, I will give just one of them.
In a fair election, if 10,313,906 Syrians out of 11,634,412 had voted for Assad, the exact result would have been “88.64999795434440”, mathematically speaking. For the public, it would have been rounded to the ’88.6%’.
One more vote is needed to tip the decimal fraction from “6” to “7”: 10,313,907 out of 11,634,412 is 88.6500065495360%, which would have been transformed to “88.7%” for the public.
So, from the 10,313,907th Assad’s supporter to the 10,325,540th one, Assad would have got the 88.7%. The ten-million-three-hundred-twenty-five-thousand-five-hundred-forty-first Syrian who had voted for him would have tipped the decimal figure further to “8”. The result would have become “88.8%”.
So, there are 11,634 possible options for Syrians to give Assad the figure of 88.7%.
But to hit that 88.70000% precisely, right with 4 zeros, there were only 2 options: 10,319,723 and 10,319,724. 10,319,722 would still have given 88.69999%, and 10,319,725 would have given 88.70001%.
In free elections, every Syrian decides for himself, so the numbers are random. In free elections, the numbers are as free as the voters themselves. The probability of randomly hitting 2 out of 11 thousand options is easy to calculate. It is 2/11634 = 0.0002 = 0.02%.
And we have three such hits. As you see, four results have improbable zeros after the decimal separator. One of these numbers is already dependent, "not free" since the sum of the candidates' results plus invalid ballots must give 100% of the turnout.
In fact, Assad has a problem there too: a mistake of 1 vote. It seems no one counted the votes properly. But let's be forgiving to people who don't know mathematics.
So, the probability of three independent random events = 0.02% x 0.02% x 0.02% = 0.0000000005% or 1/200,000,000,000.
One two-hundred-billionth.
In the rest of the text, I will not bother you with such meticulous calculations. For simplicity’s sake, we’ll assume that the probability of "0000" in a row is 0.0001-0.0002 or 0.01 %-0 .02%, "000" - 0.001 = 0.1%, and so on.
If you have crawled up to this point on your own with a calculator in hand and got all these numbers, receive my congratulations. You are an election observer who has exposed a usurping tyrant, and you can proceed to crack down on the Luhansk referendum, the head of the so-called Donetsk Peoples Republic of rebels, the Venezuelan dictator Maduro, and even undermine the legitimacy of Vladimir Putin in the occupied territories of Ukraine.
An aggressor, a heavily armed terrorist, an authoritarian socialist, and a bloodthirsty tyrant from the Middle Ages — the desperate political creatures who scramble for reverse engineering.
It is logical that the regimes that resort to concealing detailed data by polling station and fabricating results using reverse engineering are usually the bloodiest: they do not even have the support that can be bribed with money or coerced by administrative resources. Everything they hold on to is sheer violence and a lot of blood. All they need besides tools of murder and torture is a piece of paper and a calculator. Educated people flee such countries, so criminals, lacking the skill to use a calculator properly, leave obvious traces of fabrication.
Ballots voted but not counted
Bashar al-Assad, together with his wife, voted in the presidential election on June 3, 2014. Photo AP.
It is especially disgusting that this systematic bloodshed and violence is hidden behind the sweet smiles of impostors posing for photo-ops during such peaceful and benevolent events as #elections.
Separatists' election
Faux sparkle of elections
In the absence of ballot tallies, displays of screens, graphics, and exit poll percentages give the illusion of a "real" election.
On 2 November 2014, the separatists held an ‘election’ in Donetsk.
The data, as you have already guessed were fabricated by the method of ‘reverse engineering’.
Later, a scandal erupted.
The official protocols have been hidden, but they can still be found in all kinds of quality. This copy is kept in my collection.
Protocol of the DPR Central Election Commission, page 1
The opening page of the “election” protocol from the DPR, found online despite attempts to conceal it. This is the source of the figures used in our calculations.
Protocol of the CEC of the "DNR", page 2
An official document showing the results of the "elections" in the "DNR". When the figures are divided, they yield suspiciously round percentages.
For your convenience, I will give them in digital form:
valid ballots 969,644
invalid ballots 43,039
votes for Zakharchenko A.V. 765,340
votes for A.I. Kofman 111,024
votes for Sivokonenko Y.V. 93,280
🧮Try to uncover the falsifications yourself.
Peace. Labor. Independence
Campaign billboards in Makiivka ahead of the “elections” in the DNR on November 2, 2014. Voting was conducted, but there was no ballot counting—just as there was no sense in such campaigning.
The End of the Donetsk Forger
I hope you managed to get something like this
Calculated falsification
The number of invalid ballots and votes is divisible by the number of valid ones with precision to 4–5 decimal places in per cent. This is not the result of voting, these are preassigned numbers. Their artificial neatness makes the fact of falsification obvious.
Zakharchenko's dungeons were no better than those of Assad. The main difference is that liberation hasn't cracked them open yet, so we haven't seen them from the inside. But retribution came to the usurper in its peculiar form. In 2018, he was blown up right into the thin air out of which the CEC of the DNR conjured his victorious figures.
Place of Zakharchenko’s death
On August 31, 2018, at 17:28 local time, an explosion in the café “Separatist” in central Donetsk caused Zakharchenko a traumatic brain injury incompatible with life.
To murder murderers is not the best solution. They must be tried, convicted and isolated from society for the society's guidance. Otherwise, the chain of violence that begins with electoral fraud is not interrupted. It was not interrupted in Donetsk either.
Falsification with an assault rifle at the ready
Armed fighters of the DNR celebrate their “victory.” The seizure of power began with a forged referendum and falsified “elections.” It then proceeded with violence and the destruction of the state.
The election fraud of 2014 was not just a domestic crime — it was a stepping stone to war and Russia’s annexation of Donetsk in 2022. A chain of lies never ends on its own. What begins with a fake referendum and men with guns on the streets ends in a handshake in the Kremlin. Fraud doesn’t merely violate electoral law — it shatters the postwar international order, turning fake expressions of will into tools of annexation and war, all under the guise of legality and the so-called “will of the people.”
Annexation as the culmination of falsification
The 2022 ceremony of annexing the occupied territories to Russia. The apex of a long campaign of deceit: election fraud, staged referendums, and violent seizure disguised as legality.
Another bloody electoral protocol
This protocol also brought about a lot of bloodshed and eventually became one of the causes of the First Russo-Ukrainian War.
Protocol paper as the fuel of the war
The protocol of the referendum held in Luhansk on May 11, 2014. Even today we can simply look at this paper—and doubt whether any counting took place.
You may not understand Russian, but you can see the self-incriminating figures that were printed on the document:
registered voters 1,807,739
ballots issued at PECs 1,359,420
ballots issued outside PECs 15,875
valid ballots 1,349,360
invalid ballots 10,060
votes in favour 1,298,084
votes against 51,276
In addition to being dishonest, these perpetrators were dumb enough to make a mistake uncommon to the crooks in this collection.
🧮 Will you be lucky to detect their blunder?
Stationary voting in the LNR
Elderly voters vote at a polling station during the referendum in the LNR. It is unknown when and how these ballots were used, but the final results were declared without counting them.
Spectacle of Unprecedented Stupidity
When the result is known beforehand
With the outcome fixed in advance, the LNR CEC initially overlooked mobile voting, then backdated its inclusion, and finally discarded it from their tally.
Due to the lack of professionalism among separatists, they thought that there was only stationary voting, i.e. voting at the premises of polling stations, whereas so-called 'mobile voting' is used for voting outside of the premises to let the sick and the disabled to cast their ballots. As a result, the separatists fabricated only stationary voting (line 3 of the protocol), basing their calculation on the number of voters in the voter list (line 1 of the protocol).
Then, from line 3 of the protocol they produced the number of valid ballots (line 9 of the protocol) and the number of invalid ballots ( line 8 of the protocol).
And from the valid ones they fabricated the number of votes ‘In Favour’ and ‘Against’.
Only at this stage, do they realise that they missed mobile voting out! They were too lazy or hasty to recalculate all the figures. Maybe, they have already reported the results of the machinations. So, they took 15875 mobile voting ballots out of thin air. They handed them out, according to line 4. They discovered them in mobile ballot boxes, according to line 6, and a supernatural picture was immortalized in the official document.
1,375,295 ballots were extracted from stationary and mobile ballot boxes, and when counted, only 1,359,420 valid and invalid ballots were found.
15875 ballots ‘removed from the ballot boxes’ evaporated right in the hands of commission members on the way from the ballot box to the sorting table and went into oblivion, into the world of sick fantasies of the LNR CEC, from which they had earlier appeared in the form of ballots for mobile voting.
The Devil giveth 15875 ballots, the Devil taketh 15875 ballots away.
Percentages caught red-handed
The protocol shows only absolute numbers. But when you divide them, suspiciously "even" percentages emerge—so even that they reveal not the work of the counting commission but the work of a calculator.
If the estimated probability of getting round percentages is about 1/10,000,000,000,000 (one hundred billionth), then the evaporation of nearly 16,000 ballots puts the LNR independence referendum among the completely improbable events.
A calculator is not a Kalashnikov
Having suppressed resistance by force and blood, the militants could not handle a simple device—a calculator. Their entire mock “referendum” can be exposed by an ordinary math teacher.
Still alive
The dictator’s disgrace and humiliation
Nicolás Maduro proudly displays that he has voted, yet he has no idea that the Venezuelan CEC will not count his vote or the votes of millions of other electors.
The ‘election’ of Venezuelan dictator Maduro made a lot of noise in 2024. The country was so tired of him that the opposition representative Edmundo Gonzalez won. At least the fact is evidenced by copies of 80% of the protocols that the opposition managed to collect.
In response, Venezuela's CEC made a statement in which, without giving data by commissions, it reported ‘preliminary’ aggregated data.
You've already guessed that when an Electoral Managing Body reports only aggregated data, they've very likely made it up.
And yes, we were lucky. Venezuela's CEC fabricated the data without thinking about the laws of maths.
Here's that data in the Venezuelan CEC announcement:
Venezuelan CEC announcement
In a TV video report, the head of Venezuela’s CEC announces absurd, unbelievable figures to the world in a clear, well-modulated voice.
You can verify the data with a tweet by the Venezuelan Minister of Foreign Affairs:
Convincing and irreversible
“Convincing victory”, “irreversible trend” wrote the Venezuelan foreign minister in his tweet, and thus he recorded, convincingly and irreversibly, the proof of the crime committed by the CEC.
As you understand, after the ensuant storm of indignation, the authorities tried to hide the fraud as much as possible, but we have no shortage of evidence.
The Venezuelan CEC announced the following figures for the preliminary vote count:
Nicolás Maduro 5,150,092
Edmundo González 4,445,978
Others 462,704
🧮Do you have enough data to expose the impostor?
Scribbled in a Hurry
I hope your calculator produced something like this.
Haste begets mockery
The Venezuelan CEC rushed to announce results with only eighty percent of protocols, already showing “even” percentages. They aimed to lock in victory but also solidified the evidence. There was no need to tally one hundred percent of the results after this blunder.
As in the case of Assad, the probability of getting four zeros in a fair election is 1/10,000, and for two independent values, it is one hundred millionth. And this is if we forgive the CEC conjurers the fact that the ‘Other’ column was composed of eight other candidates whose absolute figures were withheld at the moment of the statement. As I mentioned above, the probability of several independent and random events is the multiplication of their respective probabilities. So, the resultant likelihood of the data declared by the CEC is much lower than 1/100,000,000.
Later, Venezuela's CEC drew the remaining 20% of the results up, but few paid any attention: when it is obvious that 80% of the vote is a mathematically proven fabrication, what does it matter what the other 20% consists of?
Armed with math
The weaker the legitimacy, the stronger the police. In a country that doesn’t count ballots, citizens realised: if their vote isn’t counted, they aren’t counted as citizens. The response was protest and taking to the streets.
It is well known that the rigged elections triggered mass protests and their brutal suppression. Naturally, the rigged elections sparked mass protests, which were met with brutal repression. Just like in Syria, the so-called "LNR" and "DNR," the fraudsters—unable to manage even a basic calculator—reached once again for their usual tool to secure "victory" in elections: weapons.
Mobile election commission
The weaker the legitimacy, the stronger the police. In a country where ballots go uncounted, cartridges remain uncounted as well.
The astronomical precision of Venezuela's CEC
To illustrate what a ‘hundred millionth’ is, I made a special video:
Astronomical accuracy of Venezuelan CEC data
A visual representation of an event with a probability of "one in one hundred million".
In dictatorships, appointments are made on loyalism — not professionalism. This isn’t a flaw in the system; it is the system. What matters isn’t who knows how to do the job, but who won’t object. That’s the fundamental distinction between authoritarian regimes and democracies.
This lack of competence manifests everywhere. In elections, it shows up in clumsy fraud. Results aren’t calculated from actual votes—they’re fabricated, often with astronomically precise rounded percentages. The kind of precision no real count would ever produce.
What was meant to look convincing ends up exposing itself. The regime’s incompetence doesn’t stop at elections—it extends to the economy. Inflation becomes just as astronomical as the precision of the electoral fraud.
These forged numbers aren’t just pixels on a screen. They penetrate everything: statistics on living standards, the number of people fleeing the country, the prices on store shelves, and the emptiness in citizens’ pockets.
Numbers don’t forgive.
Numbers don’t forgive
The post-election surge in inflation reached a staggering 172 percent month-over-month by April 2025.
31.07.2024 we published a dedicated article "Unbelievable data from Venezuela's Presidential election with a Russian smack" on the Presidential Elections in Venezuela in 2024.
Putin pulled out of a hat
Voting at gunpoint
Advertising for Putin’s vote spans Russia and occupied Ukrainian territories. Propaganda and violence remain integral tools for legitimizing outcomes through fraud.
As you have already seen, the separatists started cooking ‘elections’ in the occupied territories of Ukraine in 2014. Even the ‘’referenda‘’ themselves, supposedly giving them the right to talk about ‘’independence‘’, were fabricated.
Unable or unwilling to get at least some actual support from the population, they continued to fabricate the results up to 2024. And quite often they have forgotten the rules of maths and have been caught red-handed.
Following is the kind of data that were released for the 2024 Russian Presidential election.
The so-called Luhansk People's Republic
Protocol for the so‑called LPR
The official electoral results published on the Russian CEC website for the results of the 2024 presidential elections in the territory of Luhansk region of Ukraine, temporarily occupied by Russia.
Invalid 6'894
Valid 1'525'136
Davankov 21'295
Putin 1'441'947
Slutsky 32'632
Kharitonov 29'262
The Zaporizhian Oblast
CEC protocol for Zaporizhzhia region
The Central Election Commission of Russia’s official protocol published online for the 2024 presidential vote results in the Zaporizhzhia region of Ukraine, then temporarily occupied by Russia.
Invalid 2'598
Valid 453'234
Davankov 8'524
Putin 423'149
Slutsky 11'487
Kharitonov 10'074
🧮Try to detect the separatists' fraud
Special electoral operation
The state’s propaganda meticulously reported on the voting of troops involved in the special military operation. Yet was their vote ever tallied?
QED
The results of Putin and other election contestants reveal the following traces of fabrication.
Occupied and falsified
The reported results for the self-proclaimed LNR and Zaporizhzhia were concocted from predetermined percentage goals and turnout figures, neither of which can be confirmed.
It is worth mentioning that the presidential election in 2024 was the most rigged in the history of observation. This is also evidenced by the usual official figures published with the level of detail per each PEC from other regions. But, as you can see, in occupied territories of Ukraine, the data per PEC could not be obtained, and the electoral authorities made up and published the aggregated results.
Falsification of election results does not bring about peace and prosperity.
The occupied parts of Ukraine are evidence of this.
Falsification leads to ruin
Politicians’ duty is voters’ well-being. Where votes aren’t counted, there are no voters. Where there are no voters, there is no well-being.
Although Maduro and Putin have not yet shared the fate of Zakharchenko and Assad, electoral crimes always end up the same way. They are signs of the same problem: the lack of real public support.
It is only a matter of time before a regime with no support collapses.
Digits aligned — soldiers lined up
Theatrics of occupation: orderly ranks, national symbols, and armed presence conceal the void of legitimacy.
Young actors on a backdrop of lies
Unexpected traditions of WWII veterans: treacherous assault, occupation, and annexation are now presented as "historical memory", although historical memory tells otherwise.
As long as the regime hasn't collapsed yet, every fake "victory" at the polls is followed by triumphant parades—carefully staged for the cameras. Just like the zeros stacked in the forged election results, human zeros are lined up in various formations for all kinds of occasions. It’s a show—both in numbers and in people.
We were the first to detect fraud in the results of 2024 Presidential election in the LNR and Zaporizhian oblast on 19.03.2024, the next morning after elections! Read the article The voting results in the LNR and Zaporizhzhia regions are fabricated on Electoral.Graphics.
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