James Waterhouse on Twitter: "No need to sit down, but -installed officials have announced the preliminary results of their “referendums” in occupied Ukraine:
- 97% in Kherson region
- 98% in Zaporizhzhia
- 98% in “Donetsk People’s Republic”
- 98% in “Luhansk People’s Republic”" / Twitter
then
Ryan Grim on Twitter: "Putin missed a clever way to dodge an L. Announce results that show voters rejecting the referendum and then withdraw because you have so much respect for democracy and the will of the people" / Twitter
Over 96% said to favour joining Russia in first vote results from occupied Ukraine regions | Reuters
Russian-installed officials took ballot boxes from house to house in what Ukraine and the West said was an illegitimate, coercive exercise to create a legal pretext for Russia to annex the four regions.
...
The state-owned Russian news agency RIA said the initial counts showed majorities ranging from 96.97% in the Kherson region, based on 14% of votes counted, to 98.19% in Zaporizhzhia, based on 18% of the count.
The majorities in the so-called Donetsk and Luhansk people's republics were just under 98%, with 14% and 13% respectively of votes tallied.
The scale of the pro-Moscow vote came as no surprise, after voting that Ukraine said was carried out at gunpoint in many cases.
It mirrored a referendum in Crimea after Russia's seizure of the region from Ukraine in 2014, when Crimea's leaders declared a 97% vote to secede from Ukraine and join Russia.
Only people with no understanding of what democracy is even for would generate such nonsensical results.
If they faked a 60-40 result, it wouldn't be so bleeding bloody obvious that the whole thing was a sham.
As soon as one side gets better than 90%, anyone with a passing familiarity with democracy will be highly suspicious.
A result of better than 95% in favour of anything flies in the face of what we know about human behaviour. More than 5% of the public would vote against
anything; There's at least that many who are too dumb to understand the question, or too dumb to mark the correct box, or who are simply trolls, larrikins, or other kinds of contrarian and would cast a vote against anything that they recognised had overwhelming support.
If you're going to make up fake results, at least make some effort to produce results that aren't completely laughable.