Time to keep strict tabs on exit polls from going awry

Hyderabad: People as well as political parties look forward to the predictions of various media organisations soon after the general elections take place to gauge which way the wind is blowing and how an election has turned out ahead of the counting of votes. The stock markets also react sometimes in a volatile manner as we had seen a day before the counting of Lok Sabha elections on June 4.

Predicting the poll results is not an easy task. It is a cost-intensive process and requires a lot of manpower, proper sampling and proper methodology to gather the information which should be analysed in an impartial manner purely based on the data gathered.

But with the emergence of social media in a big way, everyone has become a pollster and psephologist, giving predictions without any proper survey or data. Some are part of the social media wings set up by each political party. Some have turned into paid artistes doing tailor-made surveys to suit the sponsoring party.

All this is leading to confusion and all kinds of wrong information being spread in society. Exit polls which were the main feature of the electoral process in democracy have been going off track and the results are proving to be wide off the mark.

We have seen how one pollster Aaraa Mastan in AP on the eve of exit polls came up with a survey, giving more than 151 seats to the YSRCP while all other exit polls, both local and national, had predicted the rout of YSRCP. This shows how news is getting manipulated and has become a commodity on sale on social media. There is always the possibility of barometers going wrong. However, this is not a one-off. There have been several instances in the past where there used to be divergent results of exit polls and actual results. Hence it is time a fresh look is taken at this problem and some standard parameters and methodology should be evolved to conduct exit polls and surveys. Experts even feel that it is time that the Modi 3.0 government comes up with some regulatory mechanism to check the problems that had arisen from growth of social media. There should be experienced data analysts and they should be following scientific methodology. There should be no conspiracy theories or motives. They should have answers if their surveys or polls go wrong.

Even as most exit polls had predicted a resounding win for the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance (NDA) on Saturday, the actual results on Tuesday came as a shocker.

But there is no explanation why they have gone wrong. This had led to a sudden crash of the stock market leading to a huge loss for the investors as well. It is not enough to say that we did not have a proper baseline.