Very Strong Performance by Regions of Ukraine
not fully reflected in the numbers yet
I've had a few visitors to the site get mislead by the current polling numbers, so I wanted to write a quick corrective entry here. According to the Ukraine-wide vote count of 50% of votes, RoU has 27% and Tymoshenko 23%. However, this number is misleading.
A more informed number would take into account the percentage of votes which have been counted by region. (Sorry, they don't have links directly to the page - in Ukrainian it's fourth group, third item along the left side menubar. I found the English version hard to understand.) The important detail here is that the percentage of votes that have been counted in pro-Tymoshenko areas is consistently 20% higher than those counted in pro-RoU areas (60% to 40%) everywhere except Kyiv. This means that as those numbers reach parity, Tymoshenko is going to fall behind and Yanukovych is going to pull ahead considerably.
Luhansk is particularly far behind, at only 35% counted. Donetsk is at 41%, and Volinsk, where Yulia has had a strong showing, is at 62%.
So expect RoU to pull up considerably, maybe over 35% by the end of voting. This might mean results a lot closer to a 50-50 split than I think the polls predicted. It would also make for a lot more hung-Parliament votes.
Also worth mentioning that Tymoshenko is doing much better than NSNU relative to the pre-election predictions. This argues that, as Foreign Notes and others have mentioned, her campaign was much more effective and understandable to Ukrainian voters. I would also consider it a repudiation by the Orange areas of the country of NSNU's waffling on 1) whether they might join in coalition with Yanukovych, 2) willingness to crack down on corruption, 3) maybe the oil crisis with Russia and the merits of their January 4 deal (though this may have only been significant to wonky types like, erhem, me).
[update: Read WRY's extremely detailed and frequent updates in the comments below for a long list of numbers updates.]
Dan McMinn
in 11) Tymoshenko - Bloc Yulia Tymoshenko, 17) Eastern Ukraine, 31) Mar 2006 Parl. Election, 12) Yanukovych - Party of Regions, 13) Yushchenko - Nasha Ukrayina
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Reader Comments (30)
I'd also wonder why it's taking Eastern Ukraine so much longer to turn in the votes relative to Western Ukraine? And how high the turnout is in Eastern Ukraine relative to last year...?
It's not exactly rocket science...
It'd also be interesting to find out if bribe prices for votes have risen significantly from the four dollars that they were last year.
dlw
http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/news/archives/2006/03/27/ukraine_blogs_on.html
dlw
I just mapped out Ukraine by oblast and percentage of votes counted. It almost coincides completely with the east-west political divide we have been seeing.
I wonder if something no good is up. Does anyone know how hard or easy it would be for R (Regions? Russia?) to cook the results?
Orange total is now dropping ... down to 45 percent from 47.
I don't claim my method was scientific, since I didn't try to weight the oblasts by population, as one should do.
What's the official spin?
dlw
#1. No surprise - her old job back :-).
#2. She wants the socialists in the coalition. Ho-hum.
I think the thought of redefining sleaze once and for all by one Viktor Yuschenko making a deal with the Party of Regions (or Party of Rednecks) should weigh on your aging president's mind...
Orange team: 43.59%
Blue team (Regions plus Communists plus Vitrenko: 36.62%
with 80 percent of the vote in.
Last night, with 60 percent in:
Orange: 45%
Blue: 35%
I'm starting to worry blue can win outright at the trend. With a straight-line trend, that would suggest Orange finishes at 41.87%. Blue with 38.64.
But that ignores the late trend to blue because of the eastern vote. With a 1 percent change it would be Orange, 41%, Blue 40%.
Almost 90 percent of the vote has been counted in the west. In the east, 65-75 percent has been counted.
Donetsk: 233,000
Luhansk: 160,000
Sevas.: 31,000
Crimea: 55,000
Zapor.: 84,000
Karkiv: 112,000
Myk.: 42,000
Odessa: 70,000
Dniep.: 148,000
Kherson: 27,000
Total 962,000
Add this to current totals, and Regions gets 7.37 million votes. That would be about 35 percent of the final total, if my math is correct.
None of this will matter if Vitrenko stays below 3 percent. But if she gets over, be afraid. Be very afraid.
Right now she's at 2.67 percent. She has 565,000 votes and needs to get about 630,000 to cross 3 percent. She can pick up another 40,000 uncounted votes in her four strongest regions.
Most of the Orange areas have nearly finished counting. One exception is Kyiv city. The Oraqnge team vote has dropped to 43 percent of the total.
Here's how Orange can still lose, if Vitrenko gets in (I'm assuming - perhaps rashly, perhaps not) that Regions could work with the Communists and Vitrenko:
Regions: 35%
Communists: 3.6%
Vitrenko 3% total 41.6% = 227 seats
BYuT: 21%
Nasha: 14%
Moroz: 5.7% total 40.7% = 223 seats.
70 percent of the Kyiv city vote is now in (2:13 p.m. EST). After that, there will be very few Orange votes left to count anywhere.
I hope your readers find these numbers useful, if somewhat depressing to me to have to write them.
Vitrenko is about 55,000 votes out of the 3 percent mark with 93 percent counted.
Earlier I refigured Regions and decided to revise my estimated to 34 percent for their final total. The Kyiv vote has been coming in this evening (5-9 p.m. EST) which I think accounts for the steady percentage for BYuT. Note how far Yush's party has dropped. "orange forces are down to 42.85%. Regions+Comm+Vitrenk= 37.63%
Only a 5.2 percent difference now - with lots of eastern votes still to count.
Particularly worrisome is Dniepropetrovsk, a large cache of Regions votes and only 81 percent counted.
I don't see how RoU could wind up at 35% at this pace. They have moved from 29% when 61% of protocols had been processed to 31.3% with 93% processed.
Will they even reach 33%? Or 32%
Given that some pre-election polls had the party as high as 37% and his alleged showing in the first (multicandidate) round in 2004 was 39.3%, this is not that strong a showing. Fortunately!
With 94 percent in, I'm inclined to agree that Regions will not go as high as I thought earlier - although I still believe there is more uncounted vote in the east.
It is also good news that Vitrenko is not making much progress toward 3 percent. It seems my earlier calculations were based on a lower estimated vote total than we are getting.