Dec. 9, 2021, 4:21 p.m.
Editor's Note
Dear colleagues and friends,
The sixth (second in 2021) issue of our journal includes four papers, three book reviews, one response to a review and a virtual roundtable discussion.
The opening act of this issue is a paper by Arkadii Lyubarev, where he assesses territorial homogeneity of vote returns in the Russian Federation and its regions over the 25 years of post-Soviet history.
Konstantin Zhuribeda analyzes the electoral characteristics of Krasnoyarsk Krai (one of the most interesting regions in the context of elections) in the 2016 and 2021 State Duma elections and tries to measure vote overflow between the parties.
Andrei Buzin's paper raises the issue of the quality of vote returns tallying by precinct election commissions as well as senior entities. The author uses data from the final protocols for single and single-seat constituencies, as well as data from the State Duma and Krasnoyarsk Krai Legislative Assembly elections to show that many election commissions make mistakes and the protocols approved by them do not meet the requirements of the law.
Nikolai Grishin discusses International Level of Governance in the Electoral Process—a research project implemented by a group of Russian researchers over the past three years.
The issue contains three book reviews, or rather reflections on the reading. They include Sergei Shpagin's review of Alexander Kynev's "2014–2020 Regional Parliament Elections in Russia: New De-partisation and Controlled Partisanship 2.0", Valentin Mikhailov's review of Arkadii Lyubarev's "Entertaining Electoral Statistics" and Yuri Korhunyuk's review of Kenneth Janda's "A Tale of Two Parties: Living Amongst Democrats and Republicans since 1952".
The last review prompted a response from Anatoly Kulik, who engages Yuri Korgunyuk in a debate in his attempt to defend the author. This commentary serves an an opener to the issue's discussion section.
In this issue, we continue the roundtable genre we tried out in the previous two issues. This time the discussion was built around remote e-voting (Internet voting), which is gaining traction in elections in Russia. The editorial board came up with eight questions, which were answered by nine experts—IT specialists, political scientists and lawyers, including members of working groups on Internet voting.
I hope the new issue will further secure the journal’s status in academic circles and the pool of topics and authors will continue to grow.