VTsIOM released survey results yesterday that suggest Dmitry Medvedev (center) will receive almost three-quarters of the vote in the presidential election.
Photo: Alexander Miridonov
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Voting Projections Too Accurate?
The National Center for the Study of Public Opinion released survey results yesterday that suggest that Dmitry Medvedev will receive almost three-quarters of the vote in the presidential election. They also predict that 68.5 percent of eligible voters will take part in the elections. Next week, the center (known by its Russian abbreviation as VTsIOM) will conduct its last survey, which it will turn into the Central Elections Commission, which holds a competition for the most accurate forecast.
Besides the 73.5-percent support respondents promise Medvedev, VTsIOM found that Communist leader Gennady Zyuganov will receive 13.5 percent of the vote, LDPR leader Vladimir Zhirinovsky will receive 11.6 percent, and independent Andrey Bogdanov will receive 1.35 percent.
“I am amazed at the coincidence of exit polls and forecasts. They are compiled by completely different technology and the coincidence requires additional explanation,” commented Georgy Satarov, president of the INDEM Foundation. Igor Yakovlev, president of the Social Expertise foundation and general secretary of the Russian Union of Journalists, asked of the forecasts of VTsIOM, the Public Opinion Foundation and Levada Center polls during the recent parliamentary elections whether they were predicting “the results of the CEC or the electoral behavior of the public.” He noted that, after variances between the announced CEC results and actual voting were discovered in Mordovia and Ingushetia, the poll results corresponded better to the announced results than to real voting behavior.
Stepan Lvov, head of the political research department at VTsIOM, told Kommersant that that at the base of their forecasts “lies an analysis of the individuality of every separate subject, including empirical data that has accumulated into a base through forecasts and surveys during previous elections.” Dmitry Oreshkin, head of the Mercator research group, said that “It is understood that voting in super-managed' republics, such as Chechnya and Mordovia, is conducted with the help of administrative methods. We politely call such regions “subjects with a special voting culture.' It is impossible to predict that with surveys but, it is possible to make a prediction using empirical methods, since we know how they vote there.”
www.kommersant.com
All the Article in Russian as of Feb. 19, 2008
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