It’s raining men: How all-male voting “carousels” helped Georgian Dream hold on to power

The non-dimensional variable “gender deviation,” which characterizes the comparative relative electoral activity of men and women, is plotted on the horizontal axis.

A positive value indicates that men from the “male voter collective” came to the polls more actively than women registered there, while a negative value indicates the reversed trend. This variable is not sensitive to the ratio of men to women in the polling district, as it compares male activity only to registered male voters and female activity only to registered female voters. Simply put, the “gender deviation” statistic compares the turnout of each group, rather than the absolute numbers of votes cast. If, for example, a polling station located at a site such as a military base were home to100 male registered voters and 20 female registered voters, of which 50 men and 10 women cast a vote, the “gender deviation” would be zero, as the overall turnout of each group would be 50%.

Importantly, this variable is insensitive to possible objective differences in the political preferences of men and women, as well as to the potential objective difference in political activity between urban and rural areas.

The entire observed spectrum of “gender deviations” is divided into 100 equal intervals, and in each interval, the results for the stations within the interval are summarized.

The vertical axis shows the results of Georgian Dream and opposition parties, calculated as a percentage of the valid votes in each bin.

The size of the markers is proportional to the number of voters registered at polling stations. In other words, we can see the stations where gender imbalance made a major contribution to the final election results, and where only negligible, random fluctuations were observed.

The graph shows that Georgian Dream owes its victory to the anomalously disproportionate male voting area. Meanwhile, the opposition parties are decisively leading in the area of conventional “gender-balanced”, or “heterosexual” voting.