The Philippine Online Chronicles

When I wrote Looking beyond survey results six months ago, the Social Weather Survey’s (SWS) third quarter in 2009 showed that the leading candidate, garnered 60 percent of the respondents' “votes.”

The question I asked that time was - does the trend towards this candidate spell doom for the other presidential candidates? I think not. It seems voters’ reason to choose a candidate changes over each poll period. It can even change two weeks before the elections.

Six months later, the leading candidate is now down to 37%. Voters’ preference indeed changed over time as they got informed of the personal and political background of the candidates and platforms through ads and media. Surveys are just surveys for a certain time period.

Voters preference bound to change

A little over a month before Election Day, Pulse Asia president Ronald Holmes said a lot of things can still happen. “If elections were held last March, he (Aquino) would be ahead. But no. It is bound to change on or before May 10 for a number of reasons."

Not all candidates are happy with survey results being featured in the news. Senator Richard Gordon threatened to file charges against survey firms, saying the publication of survey results showing him lagging behind in the presidential race was jeopardizing his campaign. Saying surveys just condition the minds of voters, Gordon said: "I am considering suing them. Why did they include my name in the surveys? They did not get my permission to include my name!"

While we acknowledge that Sen. Aquino appears to be doing well in surveys, this does not necessarily translate to an automatic victory for him. "There is a long way to go until May 10, and a lot of things can still happen until then," Puwersa ng Masang Pilipino spokesman Ralph Calinisan said in a statement.

Poll survey ratings, after all, don’t decide elections. They serve a purpose, it’s true, but only as guidelines. They don’t account for other factors such as vote-buying, command votes, acts of violence, the weather, power outages, or even the rejection of the ballot. These factors account for at least 20 percent of the results, according to Emil Jurado.

Mon Casiple, the executive director of the Institute for Political and Electoral Reforms, agrees that “One may lead [in] the surveys, but this doesn’t mean you will win the automated votes.”

There is another survey group, Campaign and Images, whose results are not meant for publicity. They’re mainly for foreign business outside the Philippines looking in and preparing for policy changes in case a strong, potential winner emerges in the campaign homestretch. Results of their survey are quite opposite that of Pulse Asia and SWS.

Questionable Methodologies

Let’s take a look at the March 2010 SWS Survey conducted from March 19 to 22, 2010 using face-to-face interviews of 2,100 registered voters. The sample size was divided into random samples of 300 in Metro Manila and 600 each in Balance Luzon, Visayas, and Mindanao. The area estimates were weighted using Comelec data on registered voters as of January 2010 to obtain the national estimates. The details end there. What you don’t know is that for a survey to be truly random, the region, the barangay up to the household, then the respondent from a voters list are picked using a table of random numbers, or by systematic sampling (where every nth member is chosen, n being a random number).

Their sampling methods need to be verified.

• Were the selected respondents based from the complete list of registered voters. ?
• Do SWS and Pulse Asia select their respondents randomly from the COMELEC list to ensure that the people they get data from are actually registered voters?

Billy Almarinez, a college statistics instructor thinks it is quite dubious how these two survey firms come up with results almost every few weeks if they're actually using scientifically and statistically sound methodologies. The question is rooted mainly in the reluctance (for some reason or another) to disclose the details of the procedures they employed. Scientific technical reports like those that present results of surveys should include a detailed description of how sampling was carried out. He cautions:

Pre-election surveys

Kit Tatad disclosed that SWS and Pulse Asia, are using discredited survey methodology and techniques that long ago had been discarded by reputable pollsters in the US and advanced countries. He raised some points:

1. that our local pollsters have been using quota sampling and face-to-face interviewing long after these have been junked by reputable pollsters in the US, where opinion polling originated;
2. that these have produced "unrepresentative samples" that could not possibly produce any good results;
3. that the basic information about each survey—who sponsored it, who did it, what samples were used, what questions were asked, in what order were they asked, what is the margin of error, etc.—all of which should be published with every survey result, has never been published;
4. that politicians are allowed to ask their own questions in these surveys for P100,000 per question, on top of a P300,000 subscription fee;
5. that the media have routinely published the results without any critical analysis;
6. that the surveys have shaped voter preferences, even without further inputs.
7. that poll firms do what they will in their polling because there are no regulations governing the conduct of opinion polls, and there is no professional association of poll researchers that sets professional and ethical standards for public opinion polling.

Survey results would not have been controversial if polling firms took care to inform the public of their basic limitations and the danger of errors. But instead, the local poll surveys were “transmogrified into a virtual dictator” in the run-up to the May elections. The media, the candidates, and the public treated the results as gospel truth.

John Nery threw a question at Kit Tatad: If SWS and Pulse use “unrepresentative samples,” how is it possible that the results of most senatorial and all presidential and vice presidential contests they have tracked confirm their findings?

This is not exactly true.

In 1992, Senator Miriam Santiago was leading in surveys, but President Fidel V. Ramos won in the end as a minority president. Remember, Fernando Poe, Jr. was ahead of Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo in poll surveys yet she won by over a million votes. Indeed there are so many factors why voter preference changes on election day.

In his book, The Opinion Makers, Moore makes the startling conclusion that pollsters “do not measure public opinion, they manufacture it.” He anchors this contention on the practice of polling firms to gloss over “voter indecision” during an election campaign. Moore notes:

“There is crisis in public-opinion polling today, a silent crisis that no one wants to talk about. The problem lies not in the declining response rates and increasing difficulty in obtaining representative sample, though these are issues the polling industry has to address. The problem lies, rather, in the refusal of media polls to tell the truth about those surveyed and about the larger electorate. Rather than tell us the essential facts about the public, they feed us a fairy-tale picture of a completely rational, all-knowing and fully engaged citizenry. They studiously avoid reporting on widespread public apathy, indecision and ignorance. The net result is conflicting poll results and a distortion of public opinion that challenges the credibility of the whole polling enterprise. Nowhere is this more often the case than in election polling.”

The real results are on election day

It might be high time that Comelec take a second look at the publication of pre-election surveys in media. The use of these questionable survey findings is often misused by campaign teams to condition the minds of the Filipino public and the media who have grown to trust opinion polls, largely because of hype. While surveys are useful to guide campaign strategy, it is a disservice to voters who are cajoled to join the bandwagon.

In a few weeks, another set of survey results will be released.

As a voter, what you really need to base your decision on are the qualifications of the candidate and their platforms. Surveys do not provide that information. Surveys just say that one candidate is popular at the particular time that a survey is conducted.

The trending effects of surveys disrupt the people’s ability to choose between a good and a bad candidate. Let’s not waste our vote by basing it on trending and survey-driven analysis. Character, competence, clear vision, and coherent platforms of a candidate are crucial in the selection process. The real results arrive on election day.

Image from Pulse Asia