Exit polls rehabilitated-posthumously?
Last Friday the sociologists who conducted exit polls on March 26 summed up their survey. In fact, the only pleasant outcome is that they were not mistaken and no one, except for certain outspoken leaders, such as People’s Opposition’s Natalia Vitrenko, accused the pollsters of any machinations.
The maximum discrepancy between the data from the nationwide exit poll and those of the Central Electoral Commission (CEC) is 1.3 percent for the Yulia Tymoshenko Bloc and not more than 0.5 percent for other parties and blocs, which means that there was no large-scale rigging in the parliamentary elections, Natalia Kharchenko, executive director of the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology, told a press conference in Kyiv on March 31.
She also announced the final results of the 2006 nationwide exit poll conducted by the Democratic Initiatives Foundation, the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology, and the Razumkov Ukrainian Center of Economic and Political Studies. The poll shows that the Party of the Regions won 32.6 percent of the votes (versus the CEC’s 32.12 percent); BYuT, 23.6 percent (22.27 percent); Our Ukraine, 14.1 percent (13.94 percent); the Socialist Party, 5.7 percent (5.67 percent); and the Communist Party, 3.6 percent (3.66 percent). Vitrenko’s People’s Opposition bloc was supposed to bag 3.3 percent (the CEC says 2.93 percent) and Lytvyn’s Popular Bloc, 2.8 percent (2.43 percent).
Another polling organization, FOM- Ukraine, has published the results of its own poll. According to them, the Party of Regions won 31.75 percent; BYuT, 22.94 percent; Our Ukraine, 16.56 percent; the Socialist Party, 6.62 percent; the Communist Party, 3.77 percent; and Vitrenko’s bloc 3.03 percent.
Obviously, FOM’s data about Our Ukraine essentially differ from the official results. Sociologists attribute this difference to the fact that Our Ukraine was expected to gain about 17 percent more votes in the western regions. As the company’s general manager Oleksandr Bukhalov told a press conference at the Interfax-Ukraine agency, after comparing the CEC and exit poll results, FOM experts found a noticeable difference only in the western region’s data.
“What is intriguing here is that all this happened on Our Ukraine’s turf. Our Ukraine is now trying to find a shortfall of votes in the east. We checked: everything was topnotch there. They were short of winning 660,000 votes ‘at home’,” Bukhalov said.
He assumes that the difference was caused by a large number of tampered ballots. Bukhalov also emphasized that the exit poll and CEC data did not essentially differ in other regions. FOM-Ukraine is an international research organization that uses the database and online resources of two polling companies: Public Opinion Foundation (FOM-Moscow) and the Ukrainian Marketing Group (UMG-Kyiv).
However, it should be noted that the blow dealt to the reputation of Ukrainian sociology, including its most authoritative representatives, was so staggering that one successfully solved problem may be insufficient to fully rehabilitate the good name of Ukraine’s sociologists.
