The Hindu Business Line : An ‘opinion’ on voter polls

People queuing up to cast their vote…It is not for the state to decide the content of the information which the voter might legitimately want to know.

S. Raja Sethu Durai
Ragupathy V.

The Law Ministry has recently forwarded a proposal suggesting the amendment of the Representation of People Act, 1951, by which publishing or telecast of opinion and exit polls could be banned once the election is announced.

The proponents feel that opinion and exit polls subject the people to “unfair” influence and accuse the lack of transparency in methodology and funding. Others perceive this as a serious violation of Article 19 (1)(a) of the Constitution, which embraces freedom of speech and expression.

The entire argument against the opinion polls, in general, and exit polls, in particular, hinges on two factors. First, opinion polls are widely watched by the people and it influences the psyche of the voter, altering the voting decisions. Hence, telecast of these polls should be permitted only after the completion of all phases of an election. Second, as it affects the voting decisions, political manipulation can happen in these poll publications.

Information affects the decisions of the people, but to what extent? Any argument in favour of opinion and exit polls altering the voting decisions should be able to provide convincing answers for: What are the immediate benefits to the people that arise out of these sudden changes in voting preferences? If at all there is a benefit, why did they have another preference earlier?

Three counts

Theoretically, people decide their votes on three counts. First, after taking note of the pronouncements and past performance of the competing parties, the voters evaluate the parties and make their decisions according to their expectations on the future utility resulting from such decisions.

Second, the voters will consider only the incumbent government’s recent performance and vote according to their satisfaction of this performance. Third, the voters will collect some information of the non-incumbent parties to some extent and evaluate it before deciding their preferences.

But predominantly, the voters are not ready to learn to vote intelligently as there is no substantial gain or impact from it, especially when the selection mechanism is not very robust and there is a huge opportunity cost to voting, which could explain poor electoral turnouts in many countries.

Marginal voters

The argument that the information from these poll publications alters the preferences of voters loses strength as those who are likely to alter their votes are the marginal voters who have not yet decided on whom to vote, while others have more or less made their choice. The proportion of these marginal voters has to be substantial for any such allegations on preference alterations to be made.

These marginal voters are influenced by any random disturbance, not just the poll information. In that case, all or any such influential information should be banned, which is next to impossible. If one argues that there could be political manipulation by turning the media to their favour, not all media can be bought at the same time.

Psychologists have found that people do not consider all the potential information available to them in their decision-making and they edit information, discarding the less important ones. Even if a person is likely to change his voting decision based on manipulated news, if different channels come up with different predictions, these conflicting results should automatically alarm the voter to question the credibility of the information.

Paternal attitude

From another standpoint, banning the publication of such opinion polls is the paternal attitude by the state, where it steps in and decides what a voter should or should not know.

This assumes that the state has a clear idea of the nature of influence of this information in expectation formation, considering the experts are still struggling to decipher this for years now.

It is not for the state to decide the content of the information which the voter might legitimately want to know. The cost of such a ban on information dissemination, which infringes the constitutional right of free expression, is much higher and could well pave way for a ‘big-brother’ society.

While one can question the statistical validity of the poll predictions and argue for increase in transparency about the methodology used, one can’t deny that exit polls and opinion polls are merely mechanisms that can map voters’ preferences. Though conspiracy theories are a spicy proposition, perceiving that these poll predictions can influence the decisions of the voters substantially is a far-fetched argument.

(The authors are economists. blfeedback@thehindu.co.in)

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