Beyond the Lines | The glorious irrelevance of exit polls in India: Should we take them seriously?

Two weeks before India’s election results were announced, I shared with a few friends an estimate of the seats the NDA would win, based on my casual conversations with reporters and analysts in different parts of the country. The numbers ranged from 240 (the more pessimistic) to 320 (the most optimistic), with an average of about 280-290 seats for the NDA. The common consensus was that the NDA was likely to be returned to power, albeit with a reduced majority in comparison to the last time.

And then, arrived the exit pollsters — the T20 specialists (to use a cricketing analogy), gold plated auctioneers of dreams — with their fanciful radical assumptions, possibilities and predictions. The elections resembled a cricket test match series that had stretched for over a month, and then arrived short-form T20 specialists who figured that it would take them one day — a mere Saturday — to send the entire country on an emotional tailspin of seismic expectations or devastating forebodings, depending on which side you rooted for. And then Monday arrived, like T20 IPL auctions, when the pessimists made money while the gullible waited for Tuesday trading markets to double outcomes.

And like most T20 versions, the country realised that there was no alternative for test match cricket — ie. the actual count of votes. The runs scored was the difference at the end. The outcome wasn’t outrageously one-sided, yet gave both sides an equal result. The NDA, the majority to govern; and the INDI alliance, a fighting chance to test the government. The quick-fix version lost, and the traditional version won. When the results arrived on June 4, it was the predictions of those who I spoke with, cutting across party lines, with their fingers tapping the pulses of voters, that had called correctly over an army of gadget-wielding, statistic-spewing pollsters.

Are the exit polls a sinister exercise?

What if the exit polls hadn’t happened? The NDA would have yet romped home with numbers that would not have been any different. Many would have spent time by the poolside instead of pontificating pollside on the preceding weekend of results. What the exit polls did was to create a bubble of euphoria in the markets on the Monday that followed. As the nifty rose to the highest in 4 years and Sensex rallied over 2,000 points, investors leveraged gains and exited from the stocks the same day, making huge gains. Investors were made richer by Rs 12 lakh crore in one day. Question: Are the exit polls designed to play the markets? Who benefits from exit polls? Is there sinister funding to exploit markets and leverage gains? Can we call it questionable insider information-leverage on elections to manipulate markets?

Let us assume for a moment that the polls were conducted without malice and deceit. Theoretically, the accuracy of these polls depends on bases such as the sample size and the spread between rural and urban, religion, caste and other factors. Then, there are elements such as the quality of the questionnaire and the competence of the surveyor, which are often left unattended.

In a system such as in India, various cultural characteristics inform the response of an interviewee or voter. People are even loath to publicly express their choices at polling done to elect members in their housing societies. Voters are silent about their choices in picking members for their school and college committees. Unlike in the US, where one is either born a Republican or a Democrat, it has been long held that voting in India is less vocal and more private: thus, taking note of a voter’s opinion, however discreet the process may be, can be fraught with misleading conclusions.

A voter in India casts his vote at a secure booth. That voter who emerges from his private cubicle in the voting booth feels less assured outside the booth and can thus vote differently when confronted by a private organisation, despite assurances of confidentiality. Herein lies the issue: exit polls mistakenly assume the two responses, inside and outside of a poll booth, to be the same.

There were reportedly other issues too. Simple sampling errors resulted in communication gaffes where respondents were unable to recall the right election symbol they voted for, or those undecided in their response or the conscious biases of individual interviewers that skewed responses. Qualitative inadequacies in the process of picking the right representative sample regarding age, caste, community and locality spread are said to have hampered the outcomes too.

A Flawed Nostradamus of Elections 

In the 1960s, the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies in Delhi decided to study voting trends and polling behaviour. The discipline, called psephology, caught attention as the country’s voting ecosystem grew bigger and varied. The practice of pre-election assessments began in the 1980s when Prannoy Roy showed wide-eyed citizens how analysis helped understand the mood, demographics and trends of voters.

In 1996, the government commissioned an exit poll and the romance with a phantom turned even more intense. The excitement got the better of us and over the years, the exit polls became as much the real deal as the eventual outcomes. It never bothered us that exit polls got it wrong each time. In 2004, the exit polls called for an NDA victory, in 2014, all exit polls, barring one, failed to see the rise of Narendra Modi and in 2019, most polls again underestimated the heavy margin of victory for Modi.

In 2024, all exit polls, barring none, tried to overcorrect and give Modi a massive mandate. True to form, they lost their way again in 2024 and instead of a massive mandate, the NDA has got a majority mandate that regular armchair analysts poring over news and using common sense analysis managed to get right. In the first instance. The psephology of Prannoy Roy — once a delightful exercise that showed us the novel beauty of crystal-gazing elections — had morphed into a painful infatuation that was difficult to divorce.

In my previous piece on elections, I wrote how close to a billion voters indulge in a month-long exercise to showcase the greatest example of democratic choices. In these elections, mobbed and twisted by the exit pollsters, amidst the cacophony of expectations created by the projections of seats, it is the age-old time-tested system of the ballot box — unaffected by the din of the last few days — that has decided how robust the Indian democracy is.

The Election Commission, alternatively maligned or held with suspicion, has come out as the real hero in the process, emerging unscathed in its reputation amidst a political bloodbath of upsets and surprises. The technique and resilience of the simple electoral process, overseen by the election commission, have prevailed over the technological pyrotechnics of exit pollsters who are keen to achieve their weekend of fame on television shows.

Is it time for Exit Polls to exit polls?

In the world’s biggest election where the numbers and types of voters have grown manifold, where voting considerations have turned complex and age, economic and literacy demographics have undergone changes and where local, religious and social issues can influence opinions, getting inside the head of an astute Indian voter through a templatised technology-aided platform that may have worked years ago is undermining their ‘political intelligence’ and is surely an inadequate instrument to correctly gauge the mood of the day.

Is it time for exit polls to exit polls? Alternatively, is it time for a post-poll analysis to assess election results? What does the voter think of the results? Is it more relevant to understand what the Indian citizen wants over the next five years? This is because these general elections had something for both sides: a victory for the ruling party and a strong comeback for the opposition alliance. It was a reminder to the ruling dispensation that the voter would keep them on their toes and sent a message to the opposition that it had taken note of their strong stand. In the end, while bucking the expectations of exit polls and yet voting for stable governance, the Indian citizens have shown that the country’s democratic traditions comprise one of the most mature systems of political choice in the world.

The writer is the author of ‘Watershed 1967: India’s Forgotten Victory over China’ and ‘Camouflaged: Forgotten Stories From Battlefields’. His fortnightly column for FirstPost — ‘Beyond the Lines’ — covers military history, strategic issues, international affairs and policy-business challenges. Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely that of the author. They do not necessarily reflect Firstpost’s views. Tweets @iProbal