Pairs selected from 2000–2009 UN votes had 1.1% more shared absences than a daily shuffle in 2010–2019 records for 178 countries

We test whether country pairs share absences across two decades of UN General Assembly vote records. We use version 30.0 of the open voting data. We keep 178 countries with complete valid vote codes in 2000–2019 and dates with at least two roll calls. A daily reference permutes full attendance rows among countries with the same daily absence count. It keeps each country’s daily count, each roll call’s absence total, and all observed daily attendance patterns. We select 1,056 pairs with high excess absence scores in 2000–2009. In 2010–2019, these pairs have 20,816 shared absences against an exact reference mean of 20,594.43. The excess is 221.57, or 1.08%. None of 9,999 independent reference draws reaches the observed count. The one-sided Monte Carlo reference probability is 0.0001. The excess is positive in all ten test years. It remains positive after we exclude amendment and paragraph votes and rebuild the cohort. Pairs involving five countries account for 67.3% of the main excess. The effect is small for the full absence count. It shows persistent country identity structure under the daily reference. It does not identify strategic absence or coordination. The package includes the pinned CC0 source, prepared panels, code, exact reference formulas, full results, figures, source audits, and reproduction checks.

UN General Assembly · absence · collective choice · temporal networks · permutation reference · open data · reproducible research