Big gains for BJP but Bihar, Andhra may take it away

Here, exit poll forecasts 17 seats for the Congress-TRS front out of the 21 seats.

Another state where the NDA is likely to suffer a setback is Bihar where the RJD-led alliance, with Ram Vilas Paswan, is set to win seven of the 11 seats in the first phase of the poll. A significant swing is evident in Karnataka where the NDA is likely to win 11 out of the 15 which went to polls today.

The Indian Express-NDTV exit poll (fieldwork for which is done by A C Neilsen) shows a near sweep for the BJP in Chhattisgarh, the BJD-BJP in Orissa holding on to its lead and a marginal swing in favour of the Congress in Gujarat which may result in two more seats for the party in the state.

The first national opinion poll conducted around mid-March suggested that the momentum was in favour of the BJP. The first phase of the second opinion poll was conducted about 2-3 weeks after the first poll to gauge political popularity in the 140 seats that voted on April 20. That poll suggested a minor swing away from the NDA. The exit poll results are now being used to update the results for the 140 seats.

All the seats are going to the polls in the first phase in only two of the nine states, namely, Gujarat and Chhattisgarh. Thus, the projections for these two states are for the entire state.

For the seven other states, it has been assumed that the same swing in this first phase will also apply to the rest of the state. To provide the national picture, it has been necessary to include those states where there has been no polling since the first opinion poll. For those states, the seat projections from the first poll have been used.

The exit polls will be conducted in four phases—to correspond with the four phases of the elections.

The exit poll had a sample size of 23,096, spread over 57 of the 140 Lok Sabha constituencies going to the polls. But some words of caution. All polls—opinion and exit—are subject to margins of error. The sampling error in this poll ranges across states, with the highest range of error not exceeding 3 per cent.

METHODOLOGY: The exit poll has been conducted in 57 of the 148 constituencies. This is the third time over the past six weeks that the same constituencies have been surveyed. The objective of this repeated polling was to assess whether there has been a change in voting preference over the past six weeks in the nine large states that have voted today.

In two of those states, Gujarat and Chhattisgarh, the entire state has gone to the polls. In the other states, around half the seats have been voting in this phase of the elections. In each of these 57 constituencies, two assembly segments were selected at random.

Within each assembly segment, polling booths were selected at random and a total of around 500 interviews were conducted in each constituency with voters after they have pressed the button on the EVM and made their choice.

Outside the polling booth area, respondents were selected at random by interviewers as they came out after voting. Exit poll respondents were given a mock ballot paper on which the names of the candidates with symbols of the parties. They were asked to mark their preference on the ballot paper and then place the ballot paper in a mock ballot box. In the three states where assembly elections were also conducted, Andhra Pradesh, Karanataka and Orissa, the respondents were also asked to indicate their voting preference for the Vidhan Sabha polls.