IBNLive Chat: 'Delimitation behind failed forecast'

POLLSPEAK: Prof Rajeeva Karandikar says exit polls are not motivated and try to give the best picture from the available data.

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Keywords: Exit Poll, Karnataka

Exit poll forecasters have been proven wrong in the Karnataka Assembly elections. The BJP has won — a verdict which few forecasters saw coming.

Is exit poll forecasting an impossible task? Is it futile to predict election results in India?

In order to get answers to the above and more, IBNLive.com organised a chat with psephologist Prof Rajeeva Karandikar.

Sameer: Some of the other surveys have predicted the results to a greater accuracy this time. And you had done better in some of the other surveys. Why does each survey throw up different results, adopting a similar process?

Prof Rajeeva Karandikar: The processes are similar, but samples are different and then methodology used in predicting seats is also different.

Sandeep Khanna: We all understand that your poll is a representation of the sample of the society, then how come most of your poll results show BJP as always getting lesser seats than they actually do (I do not have selective memory and let’s not count Bihar?

Prof Rajeeva Karandikar: Why not count Bihar! If you leave out states where we predicted BJP victory and harp on those where we underestimated, what we can say! I will only say that we are not motivated and do try our best to give the picture as we see from the data.

Sankar: Do you find any possible way to correct this predictions?

Prof Rajeeva Karandikar: There is always scope for improvement. We will try, but cannot guarantee that we will get seat projections on the dot.

Rahul: You are saying that after the delimitation, the redrawan areas was the reason for the wrong forecasting. Then how come the private channel in Karnataka (Suvarna TV) was able to predict near perfect exit poll? And there was no delimitation in Gujarat, how did you go wrong there?

Prof Rajeeva Karandikar: Delimitation was one of the reasons. Along with that, the error in vote estimates for BJP was the other main reason. In Gujarat, we had predicted the winner correctly, only the extent of his win could not be picked up by us. Full marks to Suvarna TV and Cfore for getting Karnataka poll correctly.

GV: Why is it that exit polls in India are so off target, while the exit polls in countries like US are so accurate — improper techniques or incomplete respondents’ data?

Prof Rajeeva Karandikar: The ground realities are different. Presidential election is easier to predict than the parliamentary elections. Techniques are chosen taking into account the situation and we try to do the best.

Muralidhara Bhat M: How do you take the data from different places and believe that they are perfect?

Prof Rajeeva Karandikar: The data is sent to us via phone, fax etc. And we do look at demographic profile of the sample and compare it with the population profile. Usually, these do match. If they don’t then we might have to apply correction. But this does not happen often.

Anwesha: Thanks to Prof Yadav and you for saying 'we have got the exit polls wrong!' Exit poll has always been a matter of debate. Still, I love to see the exit polls. How difficult is it to translate the seats on basis of vote share? Which one is more scientific — exit poll or post poll? Earlier, in most cases you have got most figures and trends right; hope next election prediction will hit the bull's eye!

Prof Rajeeva Karandikar: The vote to seat translation is somewhat difficult, in the sense that best model also may still give error. Our assessment is that even if we had got Congress and BJP votes shares correctly in each region, we would have still predicted lesser seats for BJP — 99 to be precise.

Rushabh Doshi: Does the increase in sample size, reduce the error in exit poll, and secondly, won't it be better to take samples from all constituencies?