Mind conditioning? FOLLOW SINGAPORE EXAMPLE: LET’S BAN ELECTION SURVEYS

By Manny Piñol

For a country which is just about one-third of Davao City’s land area, Singapore has implemented so many innovations in governance which the Philippines could learn from ranging from enforcing the law to the letter to establishing an incorruptible police force.

Today, as we ordinary Filipinos grapple to understand and interpret the results of so many so called “pre-election candidate preference surveys,” we look at Singapore again to see how this tiny nation avoided the obvious “mind conditioning” operations perpetrated by interest groups using survey firms.

While opinion surveys are allowed in Singapore as in any other democratic country, election surveys and exit polls during the campaign period are illegal.

The country passed the Parliamentary Elections Act which bans the publication of election surveys and exit polls during the election season starting from the start of the campaign period up to the time the voting centers close.

Section 78C of the Parliamentary Elections Act does not prohibit the conduct of the surveys and the polls, as these are obviously needed by the political parties to assess their standing, but these cannot be shared with the public and will have to be embargoed until after the voting has ended.

Many political observers agree that the Singapore law is reasonable because survey results actually tend to influence the mindset of the voters and could prove to be misleading.

Take the case of the results of the surveys conducted by different polling groups in the Philippines.

The country’s two leading survey firms, the Social Weather Station and Pulse Asia, could not even come up with similar results in their presidential preference surveys.

In a survey conducted in January, for example, Pulse Asia showed said Senator Grace Poe was ahead with 30%; Vice President Jejomar Binay came in second with 23% and Manuel Roxas III and Davao City Mayor Rody Duterte were tied in third with 20%.

During the same period, SWS conducted its own survey showing that it was Binay who was leading with 31%, Poe was second with 24%, Roxas third with 21% and Duterte fourth with 20%.

These figures, specifically the 7% difference both ways between Binay and Poe are simply irrational.

Did SWS, who picked Binay the leader with a 7% lead, and Pulse Asia which had Poe ahead with 7% conduct their survey in the same country?

Add to that the results of the informal surveys conducted by other institutions like Rappler, Manila Broadcasting Corp. through its station DZRH and other independent groups which showed that Duterte was ahead by a proverbial mile or tied for top place with Poe.

Of course, the established survey firms like Pulse Asia and SWS will simply dismiss the results of the informal surveys as unscientific and gloss over the fact that these pollings done by Rappler and MBC DZRH involve over 50,000 respondents as compared to the 1,800 respondents of both Pulse Asia and SWS.

How could the views of 1,800 people represent the national sentiment of a country of 105 million with 59 million voters?

There have been instances in the history of world politics where the survey results did not match the outcome of the elections.

Here are five notable political poll blunders in U.S. history as written by Scott Bomboy, editor-in-chief of the National Constitution Centre:

– Alf Landon beats FDR in a landslide

The mother of all botched political polls was a 1936 Literary Digest straw poll survey that said GOP challenger Alf Landon would win in a landslide over the incumbent, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, with 57 percent of the vote.

The Literary Digest used national straw polls in 1920, 1924, 1928 and 1932, and it guessed the winner of each presidential election.

In 1936, a young rival pollster, George Gallup, made his own prediction before the magazine issued its poll: He said Literary Digest would get it all wrong, despite the Digest’s decent track record in previous polls.

So was he right? The Literary Digest disaster helped establish Gallup as the nation’s pre-eminent pollster. The Digest polled about 2 million people, most of who were magazine readers, car owners or telephone customers—and had money during the Depression. It was not a representative sample.

Gallup used a random poll sample of 50,000 people.

President Roosevelt won the 1936 election easily, with 63 percent of the vote, and the Literary Digest was out of business the following year. If he had won, Landon could have been our wartime president.

– Thomas Dewey beats Harry S. Truman

In a replay of 1936, newspaper polls printed headlines about an easy win for GOP challenger Thomas Dewey over the incumbent President Harry S. Truman.

The Roper poll had stopped doing surveys in September about the race. The Gallup poll had the race at 45 percent for Dewey and 41 percent for Truman.

In the end, Truman won by a 50-45 percent vote, and he got to hold up a copy of the Chicago Tribune and gloat a lot.

Gallup and other pollsters survived a wave of negative opinion by adjusting their sampling methods and apologizing to customers.

In a 1998 AP article, George Gallup Jr. explained one valuable lesson his father’s company learned.

“We stopped polling a few weeks too soon,” said Gallup Jr. “We had been lulled into thinking that nothing much changes in the last few weeks of the campaign.”

– Bob Dole’s third-place finish in the 1996 Arizona primaries

Three major TV networks said that based on exit polling, Kansas Senator Bob Dole would trail Steve Forbes and Pat Buchanan in the Arizona presidential primary.

But later in the evening, it was apparent that Dole, who later won the presidential nomination, was clearly in second place.

So what happened?

CNN later reported that Buchanan followers targeted the exit pollsters and tried to influence their work. CNN, CBS and ABC used the same polling company, and that magnified the error.

All three networks apologized.

– Who’s the president: Gore or Bush or Kerry?

In one of the great controversies in modern politics (and TV news coverage), the TV networks called the presidential race for Al Gore, then George Bush, and then for no candidate after exit polls indicated Gore had won Florida—and the 2000 presidential election.

The same service that did the 1996 Arizona primary, the Voter News Service, called Florida for Gore before polls had closed in the Sunshine State – and it was all downhill from there.

The U.S. Supreme Court finally decided the 2000 election with its Bush v. Gore decision.

In 2004, a new service replaced the Voter News Service. Early exit poll results from the National Election Pool showed John Kerry had won Ohio and New Mexico. President Bush actually won those states, which gave him a victory margin.

– A Clinton wins in New Hampshire

In the 2008 New Hampshire presidential primary, Barack Obama was projected by pollsters to win easily over Hillary Clinton.

How off were the polls in that primary?

The consensus of seven polls taken just before the primary had Obama winning by 8.2 percent in the voting. Instead, Clinton beat Obama by a 39 to 36 percent margin. So the polls were off by a staggering 11 percent.

And in a twist, exit pollsters said Hillary Clinton would have finished second if another Democrat had been allowed into the primary: Bill Clinton was the choice of 56 percent of the voters, if he had been eligible to run for a third term as president.

So, these are clear proofs that even the best survey firms with the noblest of intentions could commit monumental blunders.

How much more for the privately-owned survey firms in the Philippines which have not even bothered to divulge to the public the people behind these outfits.

Admittedly, there simply is no possibility that the conduct of surveys in the 2016 Presidential elections could be stopped or even just embargoed.

But hopefully this article would give Filipino voters a caveat and fair warning that the results of the surveys conducted by the SWS and Pulse Asia could be erroneous as proven many ties in the past.

(Photo of the erroneous headline announcing the victory of Dewey over Roosevelt downloaded from the National Constitution Centre.)