OPINION: Why we should ignore polls that predict election results | Psychodelia2 EbrahimFakir
There are 'opinion polls' and then there are polls that serve as propaganda tools, which just happen to be called 'opinion polls'. Both can be dodgy, writeThere are sound reasons why democratic societies hold elections. They enable the establishment of the will of the people and consequently constitute representative government.
Elections systematise and manage the contestation and conflict over the issues and the distribution of resources that may be at stake in society. Depending on levels of voter participation , an election creates the density of social capital and creates the possibility for the construction of a civic culture of social reciprocity, solidarity and co-operation in society.
In aggregating the people's will through an election, there are good reasons for a secret ballot. It protects the citizens' right to free political choice individually and in community. In a democracy the result is only known once the final tally is computed.
Elections are onerous, costly, time consuming, inordinately expensive and resource intensive and above all, incept risk in already fraught socio-political contexts, exacerbating underlying tensions that competitive political contests introduce, that could easily spill over into overt conflict.
Internal polls conducted by political parties need to be differentiated from those conducted by media and marketing agencies. Special interest lobby groups often publish polls in order to influence and sway the electoral result in favour of the party they may be aligned to, or to bolster or undermine one or other faction of that party. Such action may even include a cognitive bias to undercount their political opponents' support to demoralise their voters to enable voter conversion.
For these reasons alone, this technique is bound to be more reliable than artificial and ersatz polls. The limit of this technique would be assessing and estimating the extent to which current events in the close run-up to an election impact on voter choices and voter behaviour.
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