Decoding 2019 | Most exit polls claim BJP-led NDA winning in a landslide. Should we believe them?

Rakesh Sharma | Rima M.

"To err is human, and to err again and again is to be a pollster in India," wrote Rahul Verma in an essay on election-related polling in India. The question we are asking today is if pollsters have erred again, or is it, as they claim, a landslide for the NDA.

Helen Regan wrote in CNN on May 20, 2019 that Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi is on course to win a second term after polling in the world's biggest election came to a close on Sunday. She added, "initial exit polls suggest." 'Suggest' is the word we emphasise because, let's be clear, not a single vote has been counted thus far.

She wrote, "Most major exit polls, conducted by local media, put the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), led by Modi, and its National Democratic Alliance (NDA) coalition as winning a clear majority when results are announced on May 23. Modi's BJP has been fighting it out for the votes of 900 million people against the main opposition Congress Party, led by political scion Rahul Gandhi, and other big regional players, over the course of six weeks of polling. A party needs to win 272 seats out of 543 in the Lok Sabha, or lower house of parliament to form a government."

For Modi, India's marathon election ends where it all began, she says, adding that in 2014, BJP stormed to power by winning 282 Lok Sabha seats in what was the biggest majority secured by a single party in 30 years. She also adds that the release of the polls came right after Modi had spend the day meditating in a Himalayan holy cave and offered prayers at the Kedarnath temple in the Garhwal region of Uttarakhand.

So one presumes the whole scenario fits neatly into a supplication and manifestation template. Of course, the piece does not say that but it does say that the six-week-long election has essentially been a referendum on the government policies over the past five years. "Modi's 2014 victory was in part due to his promises to overhaul India's economy and generate jobs for young people, around 12 million of whom enter the workforce every year.

Initial exit polls suggest that voters have not been turned off by a worsening jobs situation, a fall in farmers' wages and a rise in far-right Hindu nationalism. They put Modi's coalition as winning between 277 and 365 seats. The polls, if true, would mark something of a surprise. The outcome of the election was expected to be tight, with commentators repeatedly pointing out just how close the contest would be between the incumbent ruling party and various regional challengers.On Sunday, the BJP tweeted a cartoon showing Modi mowing down his opponents after the seven phases of polling," Regan wrote.

We would add however a word of caution that the results of the 2019 general elections are not yet out. However, you would not know that if you turned on your TV set right now or tuned into social media platforms. If the majority of exit poll results are to be believed then we are right in the middle of an all consuming saffron wave and the NDA is all set to walk into history with a thumping majority for another term. The stock market has cheered the outcome suggested by the exit polls - the Sensex registered the biggest rise in a decade, and the Nifty50 just 30 points shy of its lifetime high.

But even when such exit polls are touted as authoritative, are there not obvious problems with the premise that projections are more important than facts in a democracy? Don't we need to know the actual verdict before jumping to conclusions about who won and lost ? And why? It does not seem like it if the euphoric news anchors are to be believed. So we will do our bit and dive deep on this podcast into contrarian views, if only to give a bit of texture to the story. But first the question. Just where did the tradition of exit polls begin?

The origin of exit polls

An HT correspondent has shared the trivia nugget that exit polls were almost indigenously developed by the pioneering Delhi-based Centre for the Study of Developing Societies (CSDS) in the 1960s, under the leadership of Rajni Kothari. The piece recalls how the first serious media poll surveys started surfacing in the 1980s, with psephologist Prannoy Roy teaming up with David Butler. Their studies culminated in the iconic book The Compendium of Indian Elections by Prannoy Roy, David Butler and Ashok Lahiri. Satellite television also lent exit polls blockbuster prominence, since the state-run Doordarshan’s commissioning of a countrywide exit poll in 1996 to CSDS.

Exit polls for obvious reasons, says the piece, are not allowed to be telecast before polling and Section 126A of the Representation of the People’s Act, 1951, bans exit polls from the beginning of the polls until half an hour after the final phase of voting has been held.

Could the exit poll numbers be exaggerated?

Kamini Gupta, a social scientist and lecturer at King’s College, London, tries to answer that question in a HuffPo piece. And she begins by contextualising the exit poll results.

She says, "In the aftermath of the Balakot airstrikes in February 2019, national security superseded all other issues as the No.1 priority for many Indians. In the weeks following the airstrikes, Prime Minister Narendra Modi saw a huge upsurge in his approval ratings, rising from 32% in the beginning of the year to over 60%. Entering the election season on the back of that momentum, BJP was expected to comfortably win the national elections and form the government. This expectation has now been reinforced by the exit poll results, which predict that the BJP-led NDA will easily form the government."

What are we missing in this picture?

How accurate can political soothsaying be anywhere in the world but particularly in a country as demographically layered and diverse as India where, as Kamini rightly points out, polling takes place over seven phases and more than a month? She says, "Even though exit polls suggest that the Modi led-BJP will comfortably form a government, leaving the Congress far behind, recent electoral surprises have warned us not to take anything for granted. Both Brexit and the American election results were a surprise, where exit polls, psephologists and popular media had predicted that the ‘Remain’ camp and Hillary Clinton, respectively, would win. Just this weekend, Australians were in for a surprise as the country’s ruling coalition defied exit polls to defeat the Labour party. In fact, a comparison between exit polls and final results for India also shows that exit polls often get it wrong.”

And why is that so? She cites as reason, the ’Spiral of Silence’, a powerful theory proposed by German political scientist Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann, which has been credited for some of the surprise results we have seen in the recent past. According to Kamini, the theory argues that people who believe that they hold the minority view on public issues are less likely to voice them due to fear of being excluded by others. This leads to the perceived gap between the views appearing larger than it actually is.

Asks Kamini, could we expect a similar spiral of silence to be operating in India?

She recalls Tejasvi Surya, BJP’s candidate from Bangalore South, who had proclaimed in a speech a few days before he was given the party ticket: “This election is going to be the test of a common man’s patriotism. If you are with Modi, you are with India and if you are not with Modi, you are anti-India.”

Kamini points out that this widely shared and repeated rhetoric pushes people into being silent and not expressing their real views. When electoral preferences become a test of patriotism, she argues, one is bound to feel worried about revealing their true preferences. "BJP is argued to be tougher on voices that go against it, making the fear of isolation even stronger for people who don’t support it."

She believes that there are two reasons to expect that we may be over-estimating support for BJP:

The first is the spiral of silence theory which takes into account those who may be afraid of voicing their opinion if they believe that their belief is in the minority. Says Kamini, "Currently in India, the Modi camp is far more vocal . This is because of several reasons. First, as the party in power and one with vastly more campaign funding, the BJP has more control over the narrative and what reaches the masses. Under the current government, press freedom has declined and the media has been used to spread the official line on the government’s achievements. Essentially, they have the power to amplify voices that support them." Unquote. Hence non-supporters may  feel like they hold the minority view.

Second, as Kamini  said before, the incumbent government BJP is argued to be tougher on voices that go against it, making the fear of isolation even stronger for people who don’t support it.

She quotes the PM when he told Prasoon Joshi, "I want this government to be criticised. Criticism makes democracy strong. Democracy cannot succeed without constructive criticism.” But as Kamini says, "the government has shown itself to be intolerant of dissenting voices, and common people have been arrested for merely criticising Modi on the street or posting on Facebook. In addition, cases of mob lynchings and violence have dramatically increased, and thus the fear is not only one of social exclusion but even of physical harm."

She also takes into account the reluctant Congress voter who is not as vociferous as the Modi supporters in the face of rhetoric such as “If not Modi, then who?”, that dares people to name Rahul Gandhi or anyone else as a credible contender. And as Kamini points out, in these elections, what may be important is not only the voter who has a clear preference between BJP and Congress, but the one who doesn’t.

We quote, "In a major pre-poll survey, only 67% of respondents clearly picked either Modi or Gandhi as their PM candidate, 18% expressed support for other leaders and 15% did not respond. Who these people vote for will depend on who they dislike less rather than who they like more. This is important because this kind of voter is particularly less likely to clearly endorse one candidate and make their view public."

Projections far from ground reality?

The DNA web team also came up with a piece in the aftermath of the exit polls and cites instances when they have got it wrong not just once but many times.

The team writes, "All exit polls need to carry the standard statutory warning – this might not reflect reality. In 2004, the exit polls thought the BJP-led NDA would return post the India Shining campaign and we all remember how that turned out.

In 2009, the exit polls did predict a UPA win but failed to catch the swing in Congress’s favour, with the grand old party ending up with 61 more seats than it did in 2004.

Exit polls are exactly how they sound – people walking out of polling booths are asked how they've voted. That data is then added up to compute a party's possible vote share and from which a party's possible seat share is extrapolated.

In the 1999 elections, brought about by an early collapse of the Atal Bihari Vajpayee government some of the polls gave the NDA 315-plus seats while others said it would fall short of the half-way mark of 272... it finally ended up with 298.

In 2014 again, the  exit polls didn't completely pick up the swing in Modi's favour. Most gave the NDA far less than the 336 seats it finally won."

The  piece cites some of the other times the exit polls have got it wrong:

In the Delhi assembly election of 2015, for instance,  no one quite gauged the size of the  Aam Aadmi Party’s landslide. AAP was predicted to win between 31 and 53 seats in the 70-member assembly. The range for the BJP was 17 to 35.  AAP finally won 67 seats. The BJP won 3.

In Bihar in 2015, reminds the piece, the exit polls predicted a 'tight contest' between the Mahagathbandhan and the BJP. The Grand Alliance of the JD(U), the RJD and the Congress finally  ended up with 178 seats in the 243-member house.

And in Uttar Pradesh in 2017, an election fought less than six months after demonetization, the exit polls predicted a 'hung house'. In the end, the BJP swept the election, winning 312 seats. The full strength of the UP assembly is 403.

As the team says, "The big problem with exit polls is how they make the jump from vote to seat share, but that’s always the danger for pollsters in the first-past-the-post system. But here's an example of how tricky it can get: In 2009, the Congress's vote share increased by just over 2%, but that worked out to an increase of 61 seats

That's the trouble. In the first-past-the-post system and when you have more than two parties contesting even a slight change in vote share can make predicting an election result very difficult. Finally of course, there is the fact that exit polls sometimes 'play up' certain sections of voters. That is, they seem to be more comfortable sampling the urban, rich, and upper-caste voter while ignoring the others.”

A history of controversy

Atanu Biswas, a professor at Indian Statistical Institute, Kolkata, writes in ET that  ever since the first exit poll was conducted in a local election in Kentucky, US, in 1967, it has been a history of controversy and entertainment for exit polls.

He writes and we quote, "The sorry state of exit polls is illustrated again and again in India where many of the popular exit poll results fail to predict the final result with reasonable accuracy. No wonder people tend to treat them as pure entertainment. There is enough doubt on the techniques and sample sizes of many polling organisations. Even if the sampling is random and representative of the population, and the sample sizes are adequate, other kinds of errors exist, including ‘non-response biases’."

He offers an example. Suppose we have  two contestants, A and B.  Let us presume that A’s support is 55%, and B’s is 45%. Assume that 40% of A’s supporters and 60% of B’s supporters participated in the survey. Among a sample population of 20,000, that means about 11,000 and 9,000 supporters of A and B, respectively. So, 4,400 supporters of A and 5,400 supporters of B took part in the survey, thereby predicting a victory for B.

Says the writer, this was the case, as believed by pollsters like Warren Mitofsky — the ‘inventor’ of exit polls — with Democrat candidate John Kerry in the exit polls of the US presidential election of 2004. Although Kerry was predicted to win by Mitofsky’s exit poll, George W Bush won.

Says he, a small-scale survey prior to the exit poll could be attempted to estimate the percentages of the supporters of A and B who would be interested to participate in the poll. A properly designed and executed ‘pre-exit poll survey’ may actually yield ‘closer ‘numbers. In addition, respondents often lie to pollsters, sometimes due to a ‘social desirability bias’ — they pretend to make the ‘politically correct’ choice to the pollster, without admitting their support to some controversial leader or party. They may even be afraid of admitting their support due to local political conditions, preferring to come across as riding the bandwagon.For instance, 28% Latinos in the US supported Donald Trump, though the Republican candidate had said some fairly disparaging things about the community in his campaign.

He explains how the statistical technique, ‘randomised response sampling’, can be used to estimate the actual proportions supporting different parties.With two parties, this may be implemented with the question, ‘Did you vote for Party A?’ along with a second question, ‘Is your birthday between January and June?’ the latter having a 50% chance of a ‘yes’ response, and the unlikelihood of the respondent lying about it.

The pollster can now estimate the proportion of voters who voted for a particular party more accurately.We quote, "If 1,000 respondents are interviewed, and 480 ‘yes’ responses are obtained for the first question, about half of them — nearly 250 —replied ‘yes’ to the second question about being born between January and June. So, there were 230-odd remaining ‘yes’ replies for the first question. This means that about 230/500 — 46% — voted for Party A.

In a multi-party set up like India’s, suitable modifications of this technique can be implemented. So, why not implement such techniques in exit polls? Understandably, it demands more effort and time, both for collecting and analysing the data, delaying the announcement of exit poll results by, at least, a few hours.

But, isn’t that better than announcing possible erroneous results that tend to be increasingly hilarious over time?"

What about accuracy?

An HT correspondent also tried to uncover just how  accurate the exit polls are. We quote, "Critics and political parties say the agencies that conduct the exit polls could be biased in terms of the choice, words, timing of the questions, the methodology they use, and kind of sample they draw.The sample group’s demographic behaviour, its economic status and various other factors used in tabulating the survey are also questioned. Political parties also allege that exit polls are funded by their rivals and may not reflect the sentiment or views of the people accurately."  Also points out the piece, results of elections in India can be extremely hard to predict and there have been instances when predictions have gone awry as in the case of at least four Lok Sabha elections where exit polls have offered wide inaccuracies, barring those in the 1998 and 2014 general elections. Two back-to-back flawed predictions — the 2004 and 2009 exit polls — had posed a question mark on their reliability.

Most news agencies have reported how Vice-President Venkaiah Naidu himself, in a surprising  turn of events, mocked exit polls and said that   most have gone wrong since 1999. He said and we quote, "Exit polls do not mean exact polls. We have to understand that. Since 1999, most of the exit polls have gone wrong. Everyone exhibits his own confidence till the 23rd (day of counting). There will be no base for it. So we have to wait for 23rd. Country and the state need an able leader and stable government, whoever it be. That’s what is required. That's all."

Should we then wait for the 23rd to make final assumptions? Seems logical, doesn't it?

West Bengal Chief Minister and Trinamool Congress (TMC) chief Mamata Banerjee also predictably tweeted that  she did not "trust exit poll gossip and the game plan is to manipulate or replace thousands of EVMs through this gossip. I appeal to all Opposition parties to be united, strong and bold. We will fight this battle together."

And that brings us to the crux of the story. The fact  that  most news channels that have conducted their exit polls have predicted BJP would win the 2019 Lok Sabha elections. At the time of writing this report, India Today-Axis My India exit polls predicted BJP will win in a majority of states including Gujarat and Maharashtra.

And finally...

Sanya Dhingra, of The Print shares how a number of private agencies and media organisations such as Today’s Chanakya, ABP-Cvoter, NewsX-Neta, Republic-Jan Ki Baat, Republic-CVoter, ABP-CSDS, News18–IPSOS, India Today-Axis, Times Now-CNX and Chintamani  have each claimed to predict the decision of 900 million voters with maximum accuracy. He says, “To conduct an exit poll, a random sample size is first selected. The sample size could range anywhere between 20-25,000 voters to 7-8 lakh voters." The piece cites  Pranav Gupta, a PhD student at University of California at Berkeley, who says that while it is not necessary that all 543 constituencies are surveyed in order to accurately predict the results – some agencies could survey as few as half the constituencies – it is important that the sample size is geographically, socially and demographically representative. A lot of times, people can get exit polls wrong because the sample size was not representative. For example, they only went to urban areas or did not ask Muslim voters or voters of a particular caste, etc., Gupta said.

The piece further says that the number of constituencies and the sample size to be surveyed are typically decided on the basis of the budget available with each agency. The budget can run up to several crores of rupees with each interview of voters costing anywhere between Rs 80-100 to Rs 300-400.

The tricky part – converting vote share into seats.

Says the piece, it is this conversion of vote share into seats that sets apart a psephologist from others, including journalists, who may claim to know the “mood of the nation.”

According to Gupta, the reasons for the inaccuracy of exit polls include voters lying about who they actually voted for, the absence of random and representative sampling, biases in questioning or simply bad fieldwork. Gupta argues that data fudging on part of the agencies or channels in order to reinforce allegiance to a certain party can also be a reason. "Experts say the problem lies not with the ability of exit polls to predict the number of seats correctly, but the lack of scientific guidelines, methodological protocols and transparency in how they are conducted. Agencies do not disclose how they conduct the exit polls, their methods, the demographic break-up of their sample size etc.In the absence of this, it becomes very difficult for us to even use this information.”

So a pinch of salt may be in order while we wait for the penny to drop on the 23rd and watch in real time, if the country has voted for change or for incumbency. We may do well to sit quietly in a cave and meditate. I hear some are available for Rs 990.