Soon after the end of final phase of 2019 General Elections on 19th May, almost all private news channels and many other Journalists are indulged in broadcasting and taking about exit polls. These exit polls came with a shock to everybody as their numbers varies from one exit poll to another but all showing majority to NDA. The exit polls released just after voting concluded at 6 pm on Sunday, predicted that the NDA would sweep over 300 of the country’s 543 parliamentary seats while the Congress and its allies manage around 120. It also showed the BJP making deep inroads in West Bengal, winning 13 of its 42 seats, and making big gains in Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Chhattisgarh despite surprise losses in last year’s assembly elections. We are just two days away from actual results of General Lok Sabha Elections 2019. Everyone is talking about the exit polls that are currently being broadcasted on all private news channels since the end of final phase. Let me try to make a sense of these exit polls and what they actually mean? Many news channels and journalists were trying to find the Modi Wave for last three months from pillar to post. After being failed on ground level today they found it in exit polls. Thanks Exit polls. However, It depends upon general public whether to believe or unbelieve these exit polls but their agreement or disagreement with these exit polls will not make them bother. The viewers has to bear these exit polls on their television till the final results are declared and in fact these private news channels will not broadcast any other news on their channels. So it would be better to watch Television less these days as these exit polls could make nerves of many uneasy.
As people have observed , apart from few all exit polls hasproven wrong in the end. There motive is just to raise their viewership. The people of many countries don’t believe these exit polls. In some countries, including the United Kingdom and Germany, have made it a criminal offence to release exit poll figures before all polling stations have closed, while others, such as Singapore, have banned them altogether. For example, in the May round of the Austrian presidential election, 2016, exit polls correctly pointed to a narrow lead for Norbert Hofer among those who voted at a polling station. However, the postal votes (which made up about 12% of the total vote) were slightly but definitively in favour of his rival Alexander Van der Bellen, and ultimately gave Van der Bellen victory. Like all opinion polls, exit polls by nature do include a margin of error. Many examples of exit poll has error occurred in the past. So, can we believe the exit polls? Have they been accurate in the past? The answer is that some exit polls have been reasonably accurate; others have been wrong but within acceptable limits, while still others have been wildly wrong. A closer examination of past exit polls is therefore necessary to determine which category the current predictions are likely to fall into. Let us start with past Lok Sabha polls: In the 2004 elections, pollsters gave the Atal Bihari Vajpayee-led National Democratic Alliance 230 to 275 seats. But it won only 187 seats and was pushed out of power. The 2009 exit polls gave the United Progressive Alliance 199 seats and doubted whether it could stay in power. Instead, it got 262 seats and did. In the 2014 elections, however, the exit poll predictions were borne out. Since these results give a very mixed picture, let’s look at exit poll predictions for the state assembly elections held in recent years. In the 2015 Bihar elections, the pollsters had predicted that the BJP would get between 93 and 155 seats with a median prediction of 108 seats, and comfortably form the government. Instead they won a mere 53 seats. Similarly, in the Uttar Pradesh 2017 Vidhan Sabha elections, the exit polls gave the BJP 161 to 170 seats, and 228 to 230 seats to the SP and BSP combined. In fact, the BJP won a spectacular 312 seats. By contrast, in Karnataka 2018, the exit pollsters got it almost right, for the average of their estimates, the so-called ‘poll of polls’, gave the Congress 80 seats, the BJP 104 and the Janata Dal (Secular) of H.D. Deve Gowda 38 seats. In practice the Congress got 86, the BJP 103 and the JD(S) 37.
Similarly, in the three other major state elections in 2018, the exit polls got it more or less right in two, but spectacularly wrong in the third. In Madhya Pradesh, six exit polls gave widely varying estimates for the two main parties, but their average came close to the mark. This was 111 for the Congress and 108 for the BJP. In Rajasthan they predicted 108 for the Congress which ended with 110. But in Chhattisgarh, exit polls predicted 40 for the BJP and 44 for the Congress, but the BJP won only 15 seats while the Congress won 68. What can we learn from these results that will help us to make sense of the exit poll results described above? It needs to be remembered that the essential premise of an exit poll is that people tell the truth when they come out of the polling booth, because once they have voted they have nothing to gain from hiding their choice. This, of course, is never entirely true, so opinion polls taken at leisure try to filter out a ‘lying factor’ by asking intersecting questions. But there is no time for this in an exit poll. So the accuracy of answers hinges entirely upon the respondents’ sense of security. All the economically and politically oppressed in the country are poor. All of them are, to varying degrees, living lives of fear. Therefore, very few of them are willing to tell the truth about how they will vote to strangers. But the vast majority of them are behind the various rag-tag gathbandhans that have been formed across the country to fight the BJP. This is why the exit poll predictions this time need to be taken with more than a pinch of salt. The key to the accuracy of an exit poll is that voters must be willing to tell the truth about their preferences to complete strangers. That, in turn, depends on a complex set of factors.
(The Author is a freelancer Views are his own [email protected])
