For whom the polls toll

The reticence of the Supreme Court is a pity, because the issue here is larger than the media’s right to expression. It is the individual’s right to uninfluenced self-expression in exercising his/her political choice, the very core of democracy.

The main point is obvious: that exit polls can significantlyinfluence outcomes because people have an innate tendency to support the winning side. Election results are declared after polling has ended in all constituencies to prevent one result from influencing another. By the same logic, exit polls ought not to be published before polling has ended everywhere.

Countries with a tradition of exit polls hold elections on one day, not in phases. The EC has a point, but surely it did not have to dig in and take this battle to the extent that the very image of the Election Commission is affected. The Prime Minister’s dissatisfaction with the EC’s handling of the fake ballot box issue in Bihar is a sign of the times.

If further allegations come from the political parties, the role of the EC as an honest arbiter will come into question. Matters have come to this pass because the EC seems to have confused the freedom of the press with the freedom of franchise. Gill could have got the results he wanted without even making an issue of the matter. He could have used hisconsiderable access to the media to run a campaign asking the people to take opinion polls with a pinch of salt, for instance. And could have stressed that democracy is about people making up their own minds in the privacy of their own homes.

The former point would have been very easy to put across. Opinion polls, in particular, have a credibility problem in India because their methodology is either poor or a closely-held secret. Most work on a sample that is a minuscule fraction of the electorate, do not present a horizontally or vertically significant cross-section of society, and therefore cannot be depended upon to deliver accurate results. Also, polls boil their figures down to a precise number of seats without indicating a margin of error.

Anyone with even a school-level appreciation of statistics will know that such results are totally unacceptable. A range or a median figure might be credible, but not an exact prediction. It would take a necromancer to produce that, not a psephologist. Gill couldhave easily capitalised on this native mistrust of opinion polls to cut the danger he perceives down to size, without sullying the standing of the EC by dragging it through the courts.