BY MICHAEL SOLTYS

Even if most media eyes were on the races involving Néstor Kirchner or Carlos Reutemann or Fernando "Pino" Solanas last night, it should never be forgotten that the entire nation voted yesterday.

Of Argentina's 18 provinces with six-digit electorates (to which Tierra del Fuego must be added), perhaps the most dramatic came in the least populous, Kirchner's home province of Santa Cruz, where Radical businessman Eduardo Costa's Civic and Social Accord (ACS) list was running almost 2,000 votes ahead of Kirchner's Victory Front with 97 percent of the vote counted, claiming two of the three seats.

Kirchner had more cause for satisfaction with the results in the most populous of these provinces, Tucumán, (even if the Victory Front landslide fell short of a clean sweep of the four seats with one falling to the ACS), but almost the only other bright spot on the map for the government yesterday was Santiago del Estero where the Civic Front headed by pro-Kirchner Radicals cleaned up all three seats.

At press time last night the Peronists of Entre Ríos (an emblematic province of last year's farm conflict) were trailing the ACS opposition by 6,000 votes with nearly 90 percent of the vote counted, thus giving the ACS three of the five seats.

Eight provinces were also electing three senators yesterday. Santa Fe, Córdoba and Mendoza are covered elsewhere in these pages.

Of the 15 senators elected by Catamarca, Corrientes, Chubut, La Pampa and Tucumán (three each), only three clearly back the Cristina Fernández de Kirchner administration (two in Tucumán and one in Catamarca), six are ACS (including Radical comedian Eugenio "Nito" Artaza in Corrientes) while four are independent Peronists (in Chubut and La Pampa) and two represent the Corrientes provincial government (Frente de Todos).

At Lower House level, the results in these five provinces were as follows: two ACS seats and one Victory Front in Catamarca, two for Frente de Todos and one ACS in Corrientes, both seats for the Integration Front provincial government of Chubut, and two seats for the Peronists and one for Frepam (a Radical-Socialist alliance with only a few hundred votes dividing the two) in La Pampa while the Tucumán result has already been described.

Chaco was perhaps the most evenly poised result with two seats each for the Peronist-led provincial government and an opposition coalition in a highly polarized contest with 94 percent of the vote between them and a difference of five percent.

In Salta rival Peronist lists each claimed a seat with the third seat going to the unheralded outsider Alfredo Olmedo. In Misiones the list of provincial governor Maurice Closs came very close to sweeping the three seats with the third going to a rival Peronist list and ex-president Ramón Puerta running for Unión-Pro squeezed out.

The Victory Front had been confident of cleaning up all three Jujuy seats but were ceding one to the ACS with a quarter of the vote counted last night. The ruling party was closer to a clean sweep in San Juan but missed by just a couple of thousand votes with almost all the votes in, the third seat going to the San Juan Union.

Neuquén's eternal ruling party the Neuquén Popular Movement won as always but by less than 10,000 votes, with the Radicals picking up the third seat.

Five provinces were only electing two of their five deputies yesterday: Chubut (see above), Formosa (where farming leader Ricardo Buryaile for the ACS broke the Victory Front lockout since 2001), La Rioja (where again the ACS broke the Peronist stranglehold), Río Negro (again the two seats split between the pro-Kirchner Radical provincial government and the opposition) and Tierra del Fuego (with the Victory Front and the local provincial party winning the two seats.

Last but not least, San Luis voted an hour behind all other provinces but everything else stayed the same with the Rodríguez Saá Peronists winning all three seats.