Did Crimea Actually Vote 93% to Join Russia?
Carl Bialik of 538 has an excellent article on what the real vote may have been. This post is based n his article,
The huge margin lent credence to U.S. government claims that the vote was tainted by “intimidation from a Russian military intervention”; the high turnout rate and local media reports suggested fraud occurred. That secession won came as little surprise, though – except, perhaps, to readers of polls conducted by the Kiev International Institute of Sociology, which has worked in the region since 1990 and has a strong reputation with U.S. pollsters who work globally.
As recently as February, only 41 percent of Crimeans favored reunion of Ukraine as part of the Russian state. That was hugher than other polls but obviously nothing like the 93% in the supposed free election. “Just six years ago, Crimea wasn’t the most pro-Russia region of Ukraine. At the time, as now, about 40 percent of Crimeans supported joining Russia — but support for the idea was about as high in five other oblasts and far higher, above 50 percent, in Luhansk, on the eastern border with Russia, ,,,. Since then, Ukrainians in all of those regions except Crimea and the eastern oblast of Donetsk have moved sharply away from the Russia merger option.”
Volodymyr Paniotto, general director of Kiev International Institute of Sociology, which has worked in the region since 1990 ,isn’t sure whether KIH will keep polling in Crimea after secession. “Now nobody is psychologically ready to accept that Crimea will be Russian,” he said, “and we have not yet discussed any scenarios for such situations.”