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05-01-2005 15:03 Maidan-INFORM
Final Data from Exit Polls: Yushchenko 56.63%, Yanukovych 41%

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04.01.05

According to the final results of the national exit poll, presidential candidate Viktor Yushchenko received 56.63% of the votes in the December 26 election, and his opponent Viktor Yanukovych received 41%. Of those polled, 2.37% voted against both. This information was reported by the director of the Democratic Initiatives Fund, Ilko Kucheriv, during a press conference at the UNIAN Agency.

According to these results, the margin between the two candidates is 15.63%.

Participants of the consortium conducting the national exit poll also noted that there was either no fraud or it was no more than 3% during the re-run of the second round.

In addition, from their perspective, the 3-6% difference between the exit poll results and the results of the Central Electoral Commission can be evidence of either the presence of insignificant fraud, or of the one-sided treatment of the exit poll by Yanukovych supporters.

At the start of the press conference, Kucheriv also stated that the national exit poll project was not easy for its organizers, particularly because of the number of scandals that had caused a split in the consortium after the first-round elections. According to Kucheriv, all these scandals demonstrated that even in Ukraine, people have learned how to manipulate exit poll results with the aim of creating the public perception that a candidate, other than the one who is actually in the lead, is winning.

The president of the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology, Valeriy Khmelko, stated in turn that the difference between the exit poll results and those of the Central Electoral Commission are also explained by the fact that the exit poll did not take voting in closed districts, voting at home, and voting abroad into account. The national exit poll was carried out on December 26 by the Democratic Initiatives Fund, the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology, and the O. Razumkov Ukrainian Center of Economic and Political Research.

In total, 28,626 people in 460 electoral polling stations were surveyed. The level of accessibility (percent of those agreeing to respond to the question vs. those questioned - UNIAN) was 81%.

As reported by UNIAN, according to the data released by the consortium during the night of December 26-27, of those polled, 56.3% voted for Yushchenko, 41.3% for Yanukovych, and 2.4% against both.

According to previous Central Electoral Commission data, 51.99% voted for Yushchenko, 44.2% for Yanukovych, and 2.34% against both.

© UNIAN

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