Venezuelas blurry picture from afar

by Christian Burgazzi Who will be Venezuelas next president? Lately, the international media has been releasing different poll numbers regarding the Venezuelan presidential elections, which have given a large advantage to the president-candidate, and are not believed by Venezuelans because they have other ways of perceiving the countrys reality, like the voices heard in the streets, which speak loud and clear. What is happening with the polls in Venezuela? Who are we supposed to believe? The confusing situation generated by the disparity among the different polls in Venezuela, should motivate news media to dig deeper before printing headlines without further analysis. Some of the news media that have given the matter a very shallow treatment, will face challenges to compete with the social networks, which are much faster and effective today to spread news without processing or analysis. Therefore, one must go beyond the headlines to understand the situation and avoid that those October 7th results, surprise the not properly informed general public, especially outside of Venezuela. There are two factors that affect the polls credibility in Venezuela, and they are confirmed in Iaki Sagarzazu, PhD, who runs a blog dedicated solely to Venezuelan politics: http://yvpolis.blogspot.com. Iaki is a Venezuelan professor who teaches Politics at the University of Glasgow in Scotland. He presents us with the following explanatory graphs: 1. There has been a very high level of scattered opinions in the results of several polls, outside what the regular range is in other countries, like, for example, Mexico and the United States, which is holding their own presidential elections this same year.

The irregularities of the polls in Venezuela is much greater than the ones in other countries, and it affects their credibility

Comparing polls to those in different countries

2. The number of people who responded Doesnt know/Wont respond characterized incorrectly under mi judgment as undecided (I will explain myself later) exceeds by a large margin what the polls are reflecting about the same issue in other countries in their elections. Also, in most of these polls the percentage of undecided is larger than the gap between the two candidates, meaning that, with the data collected for these polls, which are the ones reported by the media, it is impossible to see who will win in the Venezuelan elections.

The number of Undecided: Comparison

The problem is that the polls and the media that report the results of these show the numbers without explaining them, or analyzing the distortions, as if the blurred and biased picture adequately showed reality. The responsibility of the Pollsters While most Venezuelan pollsters are serious (besides the bogus pollster or those created by the government), some have fallen short by not investigating further the high percentage of undecided voters. There are techniques that have been developed to reveal the voting intention of those who do not openly express their preference. I cite only one study of May 2008, by a team of researchers from the University of Padova in Italy (my first Alma Mater): Predicting the Vote: Implicit Attitudes as Predictors of the Future Behavior of Decided and Undecided Voters 1 The referenced research concludes: Results demonstrated that implicit political attitudes were good predictors of future voting behaviors. These findings support the hypothesis of the presence of embryonic attitudes even in the case of those voters who at the explicit and conscious level deny any preference for one of the two opposing candidates. And in its final analysis said: The present work moves in this direction and suggests that the undecided voter is probably a less mysterious and inscrutable object than it has been considered so far. But even without having to perform complex investigations, the pollsters can discover the intentions of those who are undecided, by the variation of their own numbers in successive surveys, as evidenced by the political scientist Yvn Serra later. Indeed, pollsters like Consultores 21 and Varianzas, presented in their findings a normal percentage of undecided voters, using data collection methodologies appropriate to our political reality, which is much better and credible picture of reality.

The study was published on behalf of International Society of Political Psychology and it is available at Wiley Online Library, site, under Political Psychology (Volume 29, pgs. 369-387). The aim of this investigation was: According to the preelectoral surveys, in many cases the percentage of undecided voters is indeed much larger than the advantage of one party over the other. If this is the case, an indication of how these undecided voters will nally vote, may substantially improve the electoral forecast. Therefore, it would become crucial to employ measurement tools aimed at detecting the likely future voting behaviors of those who report being undecided. This is what will be pursued in the current paper.
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The responsibility of the Media The problem of Polls showing large numbers of undecided voters, even larger than the difference among the two candidates, escalates and aggravates when reported without much criticism by the media, publishing the general figures, involving itself, involuntarily, in the war of polls that the government have started, especially at international level, sending emissaries to all countries to repeat the message that they cannot lose the elections. Its paradoxical that the government that exerts a communicational hegemony and that openly controls all the institutions in Venezuela, including the electoral one, the CNE (Consejo Nacional Electoral), be in charge of preparing the international public opinion, for his victory, as if he doubted it himself. When they losebecause they surely will, as I will prove laterthey will probably not want to acknowledge their defeat and go out and claim there has been fraud, like they did when they were surprised by the avalanche of voters (more than 3 million) that participated in the presidential primaries in February of this same year, to pick the opposition candidate, in which they played no part. Unbelievably, one of the Chavista spokespeople went out and claimed electoral fraud, and blamed it on the CNE, which is actually controlled by them; they even got the TSJ (Tribunal Supremo de Justicia)which they also controlto ask the electoral commission of the Coalition for Democratic Unity (MUD), who organized the elections with the help of the CNE, the books containing the list of people who voted in the Primaries. Fortunately, those were burned on time to avoid new lists of political persecution, like the infamous Lista Tascn, created from the signatures that were collected for the Referendum, some years ago. These were handed to the government by the CNE. This resulted in a fine from the TSJ to the president of the oppositions electoral commission for refusing to give the names of the voters. This Poll War will leave several victims: 1. From now on the truth, that will be clear on October 7th, but after that day, the victims will be 2. The polling companies, serious ones (because there are some) and the notso-serious ones (there are more than plenty). They are all generally discredited now, and that worries a lot of these companies. 3. The third victim is the prestige certain media have, especially the international one, for having published news and headlines without taking the time to research more and dig deeper into the scattered numbers in polls, that are public and notorious. These errors of appreciation of the Venezuelan electoral reality go beyond our borders, and can end up being very costly for both newsagents and investors, who are the ones that support them, to orient the decisions their clients make.

Why the distortions? The main reason for this enormous level of irregular results in the polls is because of the high Doesnt know/Wont answer percentages of many of the polls. This may be caused by several things, there may even be unprofessional cases, like that of changing the numbers of opposition candidate Henrique Capriles and showing a higher number of undecided to later be able to justify that it was them who caused the error in their polls. However, there could be reasons related to the fact that our country is so radically politicized and under so much pressure for fear of payback against those who dare to speak against the government. Meaning that the fear of expressing ones opinions may explain the high percentage of people who are cautious and who prefer not to reveal whom they intend to vote for to a polling company, whether they stop by their house or call them on the phone. A study from the Centro Gumilla, the prestigious Centro de Investigacin y Accin Social de los Jesuitas en Venezuela, proved that in their analysis of April 11th, which studied the freedom of expressing ones political opinion to their neighborsin sectors C-, D, and E of the populationthe result was clear: 42.6% of people are afraid of expressing their own political views. This represents between 20% and 25% of Venezuelans afraid to speak freely!

Perception on the freedom of expression in your community, about facts and political happenings.
QUESTION: UNDER THE CURRENT POLTICAL SYSTEM IN VENEZUELA, CAN PEOPLE SEPAK FREELY AND WITHOUT ANY FEAR WITH THEIR NEIGHBOORS ABOUT POLITICAL EVENTS, FAVORING OR DISSENTING FROM THE GOVERNMENT?

If this is one of the reasons why not to answer the polls, these companies should investigate other ways to find answers that reflect the political reality in Venezuela, 5

highly polarized, under the hypothesis that the majority of those who do not respond are not undecided, or Dont Know/Wont Answer, but are They DO know, and they WONT answer It should not be acceptable for a polling companyand much less for the mediato consider valid the result of a test that indicates, e.g., 12.5% in favor of Chavez and, at the same time, has 18.9% of Doesnt Know/Wont Answer, without searching for explanations. Having on hand some more information from the same polling company, which can also clear up the lens and show a less blurry picture of reality. I am referring to Yvn Serras analysis, which he posted in his blog (http://periscopio2.wordpress.com), winner of this years Victory Award, as one of the best blogs in politics in the region. In the first place, Serra shows that there is a strong correlation between the Dont know/Wont answer and those who favor Capriles, and will vote for him. The data of these same polls show that Dont know/Wont Answer generally vote for Henrique Capriles

Source: Yvn Serra http://periscopio2.wordpress.com In his analysis, Serra also shows the evolution of the DK/WA in the polls from June to August of this year by Datanalisis, and evidences that among those undecided Capriles was chosen by 83.33% and the rest, 16.67%, leaned to Chavez, which reverts the 12.5% advantage showed by this company for Chavez.

Moreover, in a September according to a poll by Datanalisis, the supposed difference between the two candidates goes up 14.3% in favor of Chavez, but the percentage of the DK/WA (plus those who answered none) rises incredibly to 35.3%, which is greater than that of Capriles, representing a technical tie to the 37.5% that Chavez has in this poll. Which means that, according to this poll, a new candidate for the presidential election has surfaced, and it is called DA/WA, and he has the best chance of winning, as he is up from 18.9% to 35.3% in just one month. DA/WA wont lose with anyone! How can this number be published without a critical analysis?

New Phone poll, by Datanalisis

But there is more; if we apply the distribution of the DK/WA between the two candidates, which are obtained by the polls in the past months from the same polling company, the final result is even more outstanding: CAPRILES WINS with an advantage of 9.23%, which is equal to over one million three hundred thousand votes more than Chavez. Datanalisis Result in % with the same distribution of the DK/WA and None

Who are the trustworthy pollsters in Venezuela? Given this situation, a lot of confusion has come up in the country about who will win the elections the 7th of October; but the confusion that everyone is feeling tends to disappear when people perceive the great advantage that candidate Capriles, who is fondly referred to as the Flaco or the Roadrunner, has in the streets(while the Chavez is the Coyote that chases after him and never catches him)and the signs of growing desperation of the president, who is usually aggressive and rude to his enemies. Chavez is getting exasperated. The difficulty is make clear to the international public opinion, that the media reports indicating that Chavez has an irreversible advantage in the polls, are misleading. Outside of the country, the people have a wrong perception. It was to be expected that with so much disparity in the polls, the media would dig through past results to have an idea of how trustworthy the pollsters are, based on their records of being correct, wrong or biased, in previous elections This research was done by Iaki Sagarzazu, and is public information that can be read in his blog http://yvpolis.blogspot.com Based on his analysis comparing polls with past electoral results, the most reliable polling company in Venezuela is Varianzas. Those who are not trustworthy at all, because according to their records they are very biased towards the government (systematic errors greater than 10%), are Consultores 30.11, GISXXI, and ICS. All of the other companies, according to this study, are in the intermediate zone of being biased (errors between 5% and 10%); some favor the opposition more (Consultores 21 and Keller) and others favoring the government (Datanalisis, Hinterlaces, and IVAD). If any of the media had wondered about these dispersions and had dedicated itself to finding the answer, they would have found online this study regarding bias on each pollster in Venezuela by Sagarzazu.

Based on this evidence, it becomes logical to project the results of the polls made this year by the company Varianzas the most reliable according to this analysis. This projection shows the tendency of voting intentions, which shows Capriles winning by more than 4% (about 600,000 more votes than Chavez).

Projection of the Varianzas polls

This shows that Capriles would win by 4.42% (633,501 votes)

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Lastly, another projection that I made myself of the averages of all of the polls this year using ten polling companies2 (without any adjustments by its degree of biasness, like Iaki does), also shows that Capriles will win with an advantage of from 3% to 6% more (from 350,000 to 600,000 votes), depending on the level of electoral participation in the October 7th election this year. Projection of the polls of 10 polling companies

Christian Burgazzi International Management Consultant Engineer UCV, Master IESA @cburgazzi
September 2012

In alphabetical order: Consultores 21, Consultores 30.11, Datanalisis, Datos, GISXXI, Hinterlaces, ICS, IVAD, Predicmatica, Varianzas.
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