Significance of Exit Polls in India

Exit polls in India are recent phenomenon. Early exit polls started in a significant way in 90s and with the entry 24X7 news channels, Exit polls got major attention in 2000s. Now it’s a part and parcel of every election. Earlier exit polls were shown after each & every phases of election, but now it is shown after the end of all phases of Election. Even Election commission has created many rules for Exit polls in last 20 years. I was amazed to see an Exit polls for Municipal Corporation elections in Maharashtra last month.

If we look at history of exit polls in India, then we will find that exit polls generally capture the trend or mood of voters. They may not give the exact numbers but trend is visible in most of the exit polls. But they have been proved utterly wrong many times. The prime case was 2004 General election, when exit polls gave NDA 300+ seats and NDA just got 150 odd seats. Karnataka assembly election of 2008 exit polls also went horribly wrong. But exit polls had captured the trends of 2009 & 2014 general elections. Also they have captured trends in many state elections of Maharashtra, Tamil Nadu, Bihar, UP, MP, Gujrat etc.  But they have hardly matched the numbers in big elections. It’s a nightmare to predict a General election in India which has more than 850 million eligible voters. Even predicting UP with more than 150 million voters is next to impossible.

Exit poll agencies use different statistical models. And we all know the limitation of Statistical models. Many factors like sample size, level of confidence, urban & rural sample, questionnaire, computer based models etc. I think we need lot of research & development in the area of Exit Polls. Exit polls are still at nascent stage in India. Even exit polls in US, UK or France go wrong in case of close fights, but they are very mature compared to Indian exit polls. Also the margin of error plays important role. Generally an exit polls have margin of 2-4% vote share but this is huge in number of seats. Take an example of UP election of 2012, a 4% vote difference between SP & BSP resulted SP getting 224 seats and BSP getting 80 seats. In Karnataka election of 2004, BJP won 79 seats with 28.33% votes and Congress won 65 with 35.27% votes.  And another point is that many people in India don’t disclose the true information regarding their votes. And I am not sure how exit polls are broadcasted on the last date of polling. The polls finish at 5 PM and we get exit polls at 8 PM. It seems that the exit polls might be missing the samples of last phase of voting.  

We have many agencies doing exit polls in India like CSDS-Lokniti, News Nelson, Cicero, CVoter, Chanakya etc. Many times different exit polls give extreme results and then its difficult to get the exact picture. Chanakya’s prediction for 2014 Lok Sabha polls and 2015 Delhi polls were closest but they were completely wrong in case of Bihar (2015). Same thing has happened with CSDS (premier institute in the field of exit polls). One day they predict accurately and another day they go horribly wrong.  Let us hope this time, Exit polls will give us a somewhat clear picture about results of assemble election in these 4 states.