Opinion polls have become a trend now and they occupy a lot of media and popular mind space. Over the last few decades society has moved towards a ‘ratings mindset’. Today we choose a book or a music CD based on whether it is on a bestseller or countdown list. So there is a tyranny of rating in the popular psyche. Polling is part of the process of rating and opinion polling in the run-up to an election is the manifestation of this tendency in the democratic market place.
The problem therefore is that we have reduced opinion polls to a ring phenomenon as a function of the market. It stands to reason to ask oneself why there should be an exercise of an opinion poll before an election, in the first place. Does it enhance democracy? Does it empower the people? Or, does it provide another avenue for revenues for the media by speculating on the outcome of an election much as, I dare say , one speculates and bets on which horse will win on a race track.
There seems no conceivable reason to encourage opinion polls or justify the exercise of opinion polling except to garner revenues for the media, particularly television. Therefore one must begin by questioning the very raison d’être of of this exercise on the pretext that it has a democratic aura about it. A long habit of opinion polls in the lead-up to elections perhaps prevents us from questioning its very rationale.
That said, we have the compounding problems of (a) the whimsical and unscientific nature of these polls and the fact that they are motivated with a view to influencing electoral behaviour.
We know that there are as many polls which get it right as get it wrong. We 
know how the polls fell a prey to the India Shining campaign earlier. Even where the poll results approximate to the actual outcome of an election, the process is flawed although the end result may be correct. There is very little evidence of a scientific methodology that is consistently applied in these exercises. They seem to be a mix of models freely laced with hunches and some sheer guesswork.
Nobody, we know, has cracked how to convert and estimate vote share going to a party into seats that a party may win. At least most pollsters are agreed that this vote to seat conversion is all up in the air.
It is a bit like how scientific astrology can be because, after all, it relies on astronomy as a discipline in as much as it deals with the stars. And so when astrologers get it right once in a while, obviously purely by fluke, they can sound more important and ascribe it to be astronomical scientific basis of the study of the star pattern.
There is a further reason why I think we should frown upon opinion polling during elections. We have seen on our television screens proof of money playing a big role to arrive at desired results in such polling. Paid opinion polls, in this sense, are no better than paid news about which we make such a hue and cry. Therefore, when the Election Commission speaks about disallowing opinion polls in the run-up to an election, it is consistent with its mandate on the other hand that malpractices like paid news are not carried out vitiating the conduct of the elections.
We remember how a leading TV channel took a rating agency (AC Nielsen) to court because the sampling size of the agency was too small and did not reflect the actual viewership of the channel as rated by it.
Of course the channel had a good reason to be worried because it was a bread-and-butter issue: if the rating agency projected a lower viewership it would affect TRP ratings of the channel and therefore the advertising revenue coming to it. After all this is also another process of polling to determine, in this case, the viewership habit of the people.
Let us extend the logic of the channel in taking the rating agency to court to opinion polls in elections. What happens if a poll result is proved wrong by the actual election outcome? Can those who were misled by the opinion polls take the pollster to court because they misled them on such a crucial and vital demo
cratic function as exercising their franchise? Obviously this appears farfetched to us.
But the principle is really the same. In the one instance there is a commercial stake and in the other the sovereignty of the citizen and his right to vote without fear or favour is sought to be compromised.
It is therefore, at the end of the day a form of betting that would be relatively harmless, but for the fact that increasingly there is a fixing by vested interests to influence the betting. This is a gambling sport with democracy we can very well do without.
True, the absence of opinion polls may detract a bit from some of the pre-election excitement. But we really do not know how the opinion polls are conducted, whether they are free and fair, whether they are scientific, whether they are paid for by those who want to create an environment of lobbying for a party and so on.
In the balance, opinion polls don’t really add to the value of the democratic franchise and have little more than entertainment value over such a serious business as election in a variegated political and social milieu like India.
