Unlike most of Ukraine’s presidential candidates, the country’s pollsters were happy with the results of the first round of the presidential election, which showed their predictions had been largely spot on.
As they predicted, political satirist and actor Volodymyr Zelenskiy came first by a wide margin, followed by President Petro Poroshenko and former Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko.
The election results also showed that people of all ages and from all regions had come to vote, despite fears of low turnout. About 800,000 more people came to vote on March 31 than in the presidential election of 2014. Only in Zakarpattia Oblast the turnout was under 50 percent.
The fact that the official results were close to the results of the exit polls indicated there were no major election violations, although some fraud likely took place in the Donbas.
Still, there were a number of other facts that made the first round of the election both surprising and unusual. Here are the top seven of them.
1. Young chose winner
Lots of candidates tried to mobilize younger voters, but only Zelenskiy managed to do it effectively. Pre-election polls and exit polls show that more than 60 percent of his voters are under 40. His result of 30 percent proves that millions of young people came to vote for him.
“This is the first time that people under 40 have supported the leader in the vote,” said sociologist Inna Volosevych, the deputy director of research company Info Sapiens. “We haven’t seen this in the past.”
However, she added that the overall number of young voters on March 31 was not as large as in 2014. In 2014, 16 percent of those who participated in the presidential election were under 30, while this time it was 14 percent. But most of them apparently supported Zelenskiy.
2. Smeshko surprise
The little-known former head of the Security Service of Ukraine, Ihor Smeshko, who announced his run for president two months before the election, unexpectedly received 6 percent of the vote and took 6th place among the 39 candidates.
More than 1.1 million people voted for him, which is just 200,000 less than voted for ex-defense minister Anatoliy Grytsenko, who invested significantly more resources in his campaign.
Smeshko received the highest support in central Ukraine. In his native Khrystynivka, a city of 10,000 people in Cherkasy Oblast, he won at all four polling stations.
The polls show Smeshko is especially popular among people over 50 who liked the fact that he was professionally experienced, but not tainted by political scandal. “Smeshko is a new face (in politics) for many middle-aged people,” Volosevych said.
3. Boyko did well
Former energy minister and openly pro-Russian politician Yuriy Boyko received almost 11.7 percent of the votes, which is about 2 percent more than the exit polls had predicted. Volosevych said some people who voted for Boyko probably refused to admit it to sociologists, knowing their pro-Russian choice could be criticized in a country that has been under attack by Russia since 2014.
The electoral map shows that Boyko, who met with Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev in Moscow only a week before the vote, won not only in the war-torn Donbas region, where he was the most popular candidate, but also at many polling stations all over Ukraine.
Boyko received support in some villages in Chernihiv and Sumy oblasts in northern Ukraine near the Russian border, in Zakarpattia in Ukraine’s far west, in the southern part of Odesa Oblast, in western Chernivtsi and Volyn oblasts, and at a polling station in Kyiv.
This reveals that many people, up to 15 percent according to sociological polls, remain pro-Russian regardless of the war, political analyst Volodymyr Fesenko wrote in his blog.
4. Donbas suspicious
While Boyko took most of the votes in Donetsk Oblast, Poroshenko’s results there were suspiciously high. He received 12.6 percent of the overall vote, when polls conducted in early March by the Rating sociological group showed him receiving just 5-percent support in the oblast.
Some civilian polling stations in Donetsk Oblast recorded anomalously high percentages for Poroshenko.
Andriy Grudkin, an election observer from the civil society group Sylny Gromady (Strong Communities), who observed the election in the city of Toretsk, told the Kyiv Post there had been large-scale ballot stuffing in favor of Poroshenko in the city. Photos and videos of the alleged ballot stuffing have been published.
Poroshenko’s campaign and the Central Election Commission have denied the accusations.
U.S.-based electoral geographer Alexander Kireev and Roman Udot, who works at the Russian independent election monitoring agency Golos, published charts that they say show large-scale deviations from the normal distribution of votes in Donetsk Oblast, which they interpret as tampering in favor of Poroshenko.
Donetsk Oblast police reported on April 2 that they have opened criminal cases into alleged vote fraud in the city of Bakhmut and Mangush District.
The Opora election watchdog also said it was looking into the alleged violations.
5. Mayors didn’t help
Though Poroshenko tried to enlist the support of the mayors of Ukraine’s largest cities — Kharkiv’s Hennadiy Kernes, Odesa’s Gennadiy Trukhanov, and Dnipro’s Borys Filatov — during his campaign, it apparently didn’t help him.
Poroshenko won in none of the polling stations in Kharkiv or Odesa. In Dnipro, he won in just one small polling station on the outskirts of the city, located in a hospital.
Nevertheless, Poroshenko received strong support in Kyiv, especially in its central areas, and Zelensky beat him in the capital by only 2 percent.
Voters in Kyiv’s suburbs mostly supported Zelenskiy.
6. Soldiers split vote
An even bigger blow for Poroshenko was his relatively weak support among the country’s soldiers, whom he had attempted to court with his campaign slogan “Army. Language. Faith.”
Poroshenko and Zelenskiy split the vote almost 50–50 at military polling stations in Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts, which means that around half of the nation’s soldiers are ready to see Zelenskiy as their commander-in-chief.
The vote results showed that Poroshenko received only about 400 more votes than Zelenskiy from soldiers. He won at 40 military polling stations out of 79. The other 39 were won by Zelenskiy.
7. Tymoshenko’s oblast
Tymoshenko, who came third in the first round and was thus knocked out of the presidential race, did manage to win in Ivano-Frankivsk Oblast in western Ukraine.
The electoral map also shows she won a lot of support in prisons and detention centers, including the Kachanivska penal colony in Kharkiv Oblast, where she was imprisoned by the regime of former President Viktor Yanukovych from 2011 to 2014.
Tymoshenko portrays herself as a defender of the poor — that’s why she has a lot of support in villages and also in prisons, Volosevych explained. She added that Ivano-Frankivsk Oblast is the poorest of the western Ukrainian regions and has the least number of people with a higher education: Tymoshenko voters also tend to have lower educational qualifications. n
