I got this letter from a friend who did some analysis of the voting patterns. Obviously he knows Ukrainian geography well. But this is a very reasonable article and he makes his point very well.


The "official" figures currently prepared by the CEC will show that the
> > margin of victory was relatively narrow, 52 to 44, and geographically
> > worrisome, with nine provinces east of the
> > Vinnytsia-Kirovohrad-Poltava-Sumy line allegedly voting for the bandits.
> > With the conclusion that Yushch should "compromise", "unify the country"
> > etc etc "not go too fast" and the like.=== That is bunkum. Yushch's
> > statistician Hrytsenko has contended that the real margin of victory was
> > that of the exit polls, with a 5% "falsification" factor. In my opinion the
> > 5% is too low an estimate. I have done some preliminary analyses of the
> > results by polling stations as reported by the CEC and can see some pretty
> > interesting evidence for massive fraud (even in the third round!). I'm not
> > sure what the real figure of the vote for Yushenko was, but I'd be willing
> > to bet sound money that it was considerably more than 60%. What made these
> > major falsifications possible is simple incompetence on the part of
> > Yushchenko's campaign staffers. They tended to concentrate their resources
> > on the major cities of the Southeast, and left most of the countryside
> > either unattended or poorly organized. Even though the representation of
> > the two candidates was supposed to be equal at the polling station level, a
> > very large number of so-called "Yushchenko reps" were in fact Yanuk people
> > (!!) and did what they did. And many actual Yushchenko reps were it seems
> > easy to fool. Take the results in the Odesa Province. The population of the
> > northern portion is faitly homogeneously Ukrainian speaking, and a natural
> > continuation of the Vinnytsia settlements. But if you examine the voting
> > results you get an extraordinarily schizophrenic picture. It's not simply
> > that immediately past the Vinnytsia border you start getting big Yanuk
> > majorities where there are no objective reasons for this. It's the nature
> > of the distribution that is suspicious. In the Balta-Ananijiv-Ivanivka
> > area, rural and small city as it is, Yushchenko captured majorities in 124
> > stations, and Yanuk in 385. I don't find it believable that adjoining
> > stations should give a 70% result for Yushchenko and then a 70% result for
> > Yanuk (in the same homogeneous little city?!), and that the whole area is
> > chequerboarded in this way. What this suggests is simply that in those
> > places where Yanuk got big figures you had the "right people" counting the
> > votes, Stalin style. The same situation can be observed in the northern
> > portion of Mykolaiv Province: in the Bashtanka-Pervomajsk-Voznesensk area,
> > a continuation of the Kirovohrad settlement pattern, you get the same
> > schizophrenic results: 92 polling stations are for Yushch (sometimes with
> > very big majorities) and 515 are for Yanuk. Again the whole thing is
> > chequerboarded, as in Odesa. The same process is observable in the western
> > portion of Kharkiv Province. In Dnipropetrovsk on the other hand, you have
> > a different "approach": in the rural and small city complexes not one
> > polling station has been won by Yushch (whereas he won over a dozen in
> > Dnipropetrovsk city itself!), and everywhere you have relatively narrow
> > "wins" for Yanuk, sometimes by only five or six votes. No chequerboard
> > here: just this obviously contrived "continuity". Kherson is less obvious,
> > the monitoring situation was better here.=== Even in the Donbas Provinces
> > you have oddities: The "official" results give Yushch 4% in Donetsk and
> > over 6% in Luhansk. And these low figures are everywhere noticeable. Then
> > you get "anomalies". In the Donetsk Artemivsk district (territorial
> > electoral commission n.84) you suddenly get polling stations which give
> > Yushch 31%, 20%, 27%. It's as if someone were sending a message... Same
> > oddity in Luhansk Province. In a series of polling stations (14 in all)
> > from districts 114 and 115, practically on the Russian border, you have
> > stations that give Yushchenko 25%, 26%, and even 40% (twice!!) It's not
> > just explainable by the fact that this northern part of the Province is
> > less industrialized and less Russified (everywhere else in that area you
> > get the usual "6%". So this too is a kind of message.===So Ukraine is far
> > less "divided" and the bandit share of the vote far less important than the
> > "official" results. This should be kept in mind when planning strategy.
> >