Ukraine’s parliament is set to get three new opposition members and one singing university rector, according to the exit poll released by Rating Group. The pollster only measured the results in four of five constituencies, where a by-election took place on Dec. 15, and the result for the remaining constituency are not available.
Ukraine’s singer, songwriter and rector of UKrainian University of Culture and Arts Mykhailo Poplavskyi can get a parliamentary sit again.
According to the poll, Poplavskyi leads the vote in Cherkasy (Constituency #194) with 47,3%, Arkadiy Kornatskiy wins in Pervomaisk (Constituency #132) with 48,8% of votes, Leonid Datsenko – in Kaniv with 72% and Yuriy Levchenko – in Kyiv with 51,8 %. Constituency #94, Obukhiv, Kyiv Oblast wasn’t polled.
According to Oleksiy Antypovych the director and cofounder of Rating Group the exit poll was conducted to the request of Channel 5. “The poll was held on the exit of 125 polling station, 7,300 respondents took part in the poll,” the statement on the Rating Group website reads.
Ukraine is holding five by-elections to parliament today, on Dec. 15, in those constituencies where fraud and manipulations were so high a year ago that the results could not be established. Those constituencies are located in Cherkasy, Kaniv, Pervomaisk, Obuhiv and in Kyiv. People in those voting districts are casting their votes in 649 polling stations.
Rating’s Antypovych says that the exit poll wasn’t conduct at constituency #94, in Obukhiv, Kyiv Oblast on purpose. “One of the main contenders, the representative of the opposition forces was dismissed there, that’s why we think that election results at this constituency won’t be representative,” he explained.
Antypovych also said that current results mostly consist of data collected by phone, while the paper results will be published tomorrow, as well as the information about the margins of error concerning every constituency. “Though the margins of error it won’t be more than two percent,” Antypovych ensured.
Political expert Iryna Bekeshkina says she fully trusts the exit poll results of the Rating Group, even though some of the proposed winners are quite unexpected. “Poplavskyi, of course, is not the most obvious winner, but we should look at his election campaign first and then judge,” she said. “Even if he was doing vote buying and wasn’t caught by hand, now it’s too late.”
According to Antypovych rating Group is a commercial organization and is not financed by any political parties.
Kyiv Post staff writer Daryna Shevchenko can be reached at [email protected]
