Ukrainian parliamentary election - 26 October 2014

[jaichind]

Oct. 26 (Bloomberg) -- President Petro Poroshenko’s Party won 23% of vote, according to exit poll by 3 Kiev-based research institutes.
Poll has margin of error of 2.5 ppts
Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk’s People’s Front got 21.3%
Samopomich got 13.2%, Radical Party got 6.4%, ex-Premier Yulia Tymoshenko’s Batkivshchyna got 5.6%
Opposition Bloc containing former members of ousted President Viktor Yanukovych’s party got 7.6%

[jaichind]

It is almost 5AM Kiev and the count is less then 14% complete ?  Only place that is worse than this in terms of counting speed is Westchester County where I live.  California is almost as bad.  What is the ETA for counting to complete ?

[jaichind]

It seems Batkivshchyna is under-perfoming polls so far.  I guess most of their support went to People's Front.

[jaichind]

Parties backing a peace process to end the conflict with pro-Russian rebels in east Ukraine won a clear victory at Sunday's parliamentary polls, Russia's deputy foreign minister said Monday."It is already clear that parties which support a peaceful resolution of the internal Ukrainian crisis received a majority," Grigory Karasin was quoted as saying by state-run Ria Novosti news agency.

I wonder if Moscow is secretly hoping that Svoboda party crosses the 5% despite what they say in public.  That way they can still use it as a bogeyman to justify their policies.

[jaichind]

Lots of wasted votes. Third largest party is people who didn't get in.

Actually, it is the largest party - just under 23% of the vote. But it is not too bad for this electoral system.

23% seem pretty high when compared to Germany who also have a 5% threshold.  Even Greece in May 2012 had only 19% vote for parties below the 4% vote share and that was a chaotic election in terms of party system.  It does make sense since there was a significant realignment of parties and voter preferences since the last election so every party wants to try out its chances alone.  As long as no big changes takes place in the party system (which given Ukraine seems unlikely), the next election should have a much smaller vote share for parties that did not make it past the threshold.

[jaichind]

FPTP constituencies so far leading

Independents 97
Poroshenko Bloc 62
Popular Front 20
Svoboda 6
Opposition Bloc 2
Batkivshchina 2
Strong Ukraine 2
Samopomich 1
Right Sector 1
Volya 1
Zastup 1

I assume Independents are mostly Oligarchs supported forces.