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.]