novembre 01, 2004
Ukrainian Elections: The Best Money Can Buy
Well, the first round of voting is done. It's been done for a long time, but we still haven't heard the official results. They were supposed to be released at noon today. I stood in Independence Square with a group of good government activist types for 2 hours, and then we finally went home.
The independent exit polling gave Yuschenko a solid 8 point lead. But when the tally came out from the government election committee, the oligarch candidate is up about a point, with 94% of the vote in. The problem for the oligarchs is that a LOT of the remaining votes are from Kiev, the Zakarpattia region, and other Yuschenko strongholds. Which means the one point margin will probably flip over to a Yuschenko lead.
In other words, even with the incredible levels of fraud and corruption, the oligarchs haven't "encouraged" quite enough votes their direction. So it seems they're trying to remedy that.
Regardless of which candidate gets the plurality, neither will garner the 50% needed to avoided a run-off. But the momentum of winning the first round will be huge, and they'll move heaven and earth to deny Yuschenko that Mo.
Update:
I loved this comment from Blog de Connard --
"International Observers from OSCE are saying that the vote was riddled with irregularities. In other news, the Pope is catholic, a bear does s*** in the woods, the sky is blue. . .Posted by Discoshaman at novembre 1, 2004 07:08 PM | TrackBack