Monday, April 16, 2007 Editorial: On the propriety of surveys
THERE are a certain number of reasons why the Arroyo administration's Team Unity appear to be stuck on neutral and according to the Genuine Opposition, it's their poor showing in the national surveys which showed at best only four or three of their candidates making it on the top 12.
With that in mind, there was some surprise when the Commission on Elections (Comelec) reportedly moved for the ban on surveys, saying this may result in trending or influencing of voters and also condition the mindsets of voters that any results contrary to the surveys may indicate electioneering or election hanky-panky usually done by the Arroyo administration.
Some media outlets have taken this into consideration using the above-mentioned reasons and while there is merit, there are also questions to be raised concerning whether these are valid and sufficient enough to deny any sort of monitoring on the part of organizations not exactly affiliated with any particular interest group.
For reference let's use the congressional and presidential elections in the US which is being monitored by news outlets and various survey groups including the popular Gallup Poll. Though there have been recent questions regarding the validity of the Gallup Poll, still these surveys are being continued to this time.
In fact major news networks like NBC, ABC, CBS, CNN, Fox (even with the latter's unabashed pro-Americanism) and even BBC and ITN use surveys to monitor the chances of American or foreign candidates in tandem with other outlets or separate from them.
The country's survey groups like Social Weather Station (SWS) and Pulse Asia usually employ scientific methods though their base of respondents is relatively small at 1,000 per survey---certainly not indicative of the millions of voters, though if these surveys are placed side by side with other surveys from media outlets, the results can present a rough, yet fairly indicative picture of the voting public's sentiments.
Whatever the sentiments of the voting public on the surveys, it is instructional to note that both the Arroyo administration and the opposition camps use them as a basis to crow about their standing or achievements to the public. As Rep. Francis Escudero pointed out, President Arroyo cited surveys in tandem with supposed election results to justify her victory over the late Fernando Poe Jr. in the 2004 elections.
Then "Hello Garci" broke out and now everything is mired in serious credibility crisis. The 2007 elections may be or may not be different from 2004 so aside from the monitoring, there may be some need for evaluating public sentiments on the candidates and surveys are a good gauge to do so.
