Data is just one necessary inconvenience. But who cares?
As quoted in Robert and Casella's Introducing Monte Carlo Methods with R:
"What if you haven't the data?"
"Then we shall proceed directly to the brandy
and cigars."
Lyndsay Faye
The Case of Colonel Warbuton's Madness
For anyone with some familiarity of sample surveys, the
advantage of parallel vote tabulation (PVT) as a method for verifying vote
counts over the exit poll would be obvious. The reason is that in a PVT you observe
and record the actual vote counts in a voting station, whereas in an exit poll,
you ask a sample of voters how they voted, and that way you don't always get
information on for whom they have actually voted as in the case of Shy Tories
in the recent British election. There are also cases in which a voter would drop
a blank ballot, or tampered it to get it rejected but obviously would not reveal
it.
However, in exit polls you are interviewing the voters and
therefore you could ask not only their ballot choices but also their motivation
for voting that way. And that's exciting information for political parties,
academics, analysts, and everyone interested. While exit poll and PVT basically
measure the same thing—the voting results—one is potentially more accurate than
the other and each primarily serve a different purpose.
Sample survey practitioners unfamiliar with PVTs would have
thought that they would always have been conducted as probability samples, or
what is popularly known as scientific samples, of voting stations. They were
not. National
Citizens' Movement for Free Elections
(NAMFREL) which is acknowledged as the first adopter of the PVT, then
known as a "quick count", collected vote counts from as many voting
stations as they could. It ended up collecting election results from 70 percent
of the 85,000 voting stations in the Philippines presidential election in 1986.
Though not exactly statistically sound, it gave good enough evidence that Corazon Aquino was leading Marcos by more
than half a million votes out of 20 million cast in contrast to the officially
declared victory of Marcos (Vote Count
Verification, Bjornlund and Cowan, 2011, Democracy International).
It was for the 1988
plebiscite in Chile on whether President Augusto Pinochet could continue in
office, that probability sampling was introduced with the advice
from the National Democratic Institutions for International Affairs (NDI). The
nongovernmental Committee for Free Elections responsible for it chose to do the
quick count in a statistical sample
of voting stations instead of trying to obtain the results from all of the voting
stations in the entire country.
NDI experts Garber and Cowan "coined the term “parallel vote tabulation” in lieu of
“quick count,” which they thought better reserved for an independent
verification designed to project results quickly rather than to verify the
results. They chose the term “parallel” to distinguish the operation from the
official vote tabulation conducted by relevant authorities. They settled on the
word “tabulation” to refer to the aggregation or summing of ballots rather than
“count” to avoid any connotation of reviewing and recording individual ballots.
Nevertheless, many donors, advisers, and observers continue to use the term
“quick count” regardless whether the objective of the exercise is to project
results quickly or to verify them later and regardless of whether the analysis
is based on comprehensive or sample-based data."
That these two pioneering use of quick count or PVT were
crucial in uncovering electoral frauds led the electoral monitoring community
to recognize the importance of PVT as an effective means in deterring or detecting ballot count fraud. So, by the early
1990s, PVTs had become an important tool in election monitoring.
The idea of the PVT is deceptively simple. You draw a big
enough sample of voting stations, watch the vote count process and collect the
results, transmit to your headquarters, process the data there and make the
estimate for the entire country through statistical analysis, and it is done!
However, there are a lot of things to do apparently. You can guess it from the
contents of the NDI guide on quick count (The Quick
Count and Election Observation: An NDI Handbook for Civic Organizations and
Political Parties, Estock, Nevitte, and Cowan, 2002):
CHAPTER
TWO: GETTING STARTED
Leadership
and Staff; Project Planning; Budgets and Fundraising
CHAPTER
THREE: PROMOTING THE QUICK COUNT
Relations
with Electoral Authorities; External Relations; The Media Campaign
CHAPTER
FOUR: BUILDING THE VOLUNTEER NETWORK
Designing
Materials; Recruiting; Training; Logistics
CHAPTER
FIVE: STATISTICAL PRINCIPLES AND QUICK COUNTS
Basic Statistical
Principles; Constructing the Sample
CHAPTER
SIX: THE QUALITATIVE COMPONENT OF THE QUICK COUNT
Designing
Observation Forms; Analyzing Qualitative Data
CHAPTER
SEVEN: COLLECTING AND ANALYZING QUICK COUNT DATA
Data
Reporting Protocols; Information Flows; Statistical Analysis of Quick Count
Data
CHAPTER
EIGHT: THE “END GAME”
Developing
a Protocol for Data Use; Releasing Quick Count Data; End Game Activities;
Preparing for the Future
The handbook is rather old, but I
guess the much of the advice given would still be applicable. In our case, I
felt that the hardest tasks we would have to face may be with those relating to
chapter three. This would be particularly applicable to the political parties
among two of the user groups to which the handbook had been directed.
The Union Election Commission,
Myanmar has issued procedures
for international observers (June 26, 2015; translation by GNLM,
3 July 2015), and procedures
for national observers (June 26, 2015).
The accredited international as
well as national observers have the following rights, among others:
1. legal protection and security of the
Republic of the Union of Myanmar;
2. the right to observe and to have
access to the information on the Election process;
3. the right to observe voting, vote
counting and developing the voting results;
4. the right to observe in the polling
station; (report to the Presiding officer and comply with his arrangement
because he is performing his responsibilities.)
The third bullet ensures that PVT
could be performed by both the accredited international and national observers.
The procedures provided no explicit reference to the information collection
from voters outside of the voting process and voting premises—the exit poll. On
the strength of the bullet-2, by extension, the accredited observers are
clearly entitled to do the exit poll. But what about the public media? Could
they do the exit poll freely? I guess that depends on how the authorities would
interpret the exit poll. Is it election
observation, subject to the above
provisions by the UEC, or not?
Anyone could see that this
national election, due November 2015, is a crucial step in the democratic
transition for Myanmar. And anyone could see that we need to do things right. For
that, international assistance is indispensible. So we see the UEC working
with European Union Electoral Support Team, International Institute for
Democracy and Electoral Assistance (International IDEA), and International
Foundation for Electoral System (IFES). I guess the political parties, interest
groups, and civic organizations would benefit from the cooperation of these
institutions as well as from some other institutions well experienced with
electoral observation such as the Carter Foundation, and also diplomatic
missions in Myanmar, and others.
For the general public and small
guys, they could get occasional publication in Myanmar language from these
institutions. For a stable supply of information, they could collect the
spillovers in the tea-shop conversations, go to face book, to the immensely
popular local weekly news, or to radio broadcasts.
If they want to know about a more quantitative side of vote
count verification, they could go to The Quick Count and Election Observation: An
NDI Handbook for Civic Organizations and Political Parties, by Estock,
Nevitte, and Cowan, and Vote Count Verification: A User’s
Guide for Funders, Implementers, And Stakeholders by Bjornlund and Cowan mentioned earlier.
In addition to the PVT, the latter covers the exit poll, as
well as post-election statistical analysis and election forensics:
Chapter 1: Overview of vote count
verification and purpose of study
Chapter 2: Parallel vote tabulations
Chapter 3. Limitations of exit
polls and other types of public opinion research
Chapter 4: Post-election
statistical analysis and election forensics
Chapter 5: Managing vote count verification
Chapter 6: New challenges for vote
count verification
If they have gone this far, they may also like to look at Report
on Roundtable on Vote Count Verification by the Carter Center and Democracy
International, 2011.
The possibility of conflicts in conclusions drawn from a PVT and an exit poll when both were
present in an election environment is interesting and instructive. In the post Improving
Vote Count Verification in Transitional Elections in Electoral Insight blog,
March 2006, of Elections Canada, Eric Bjornlund said:
But PVTs and exit polls have
sometimes worked at cross-purposes. Exit polls sponsored by international
groups may distract from PVTs conducted by domestic groups or may not be
reliable in less-than-free political environments. Indeed, if reliable exit
polls are possible in a given country, PVTs – which tend to be more expensive
and difficult to organize – are probably not necessary. Where both PVTs and
exit polls exist, the results of a reliable PVT should take precedence for vote
count verification, and interested parties should look to exit polls primarily
for insights about voter motivation as opposed to vote count verification. ...
Experiences from recent elections in Macedonia and Ukraine offer some important
lessons about the need for better coordination among the sponsors of different
election monitoring techniques. In Macedonia in 2002, a foreign-sponsored exit
poll used to quickly project results overshadowed a well-executed PVT by a
national group. This did little to advance the larger democratic development
goals shared by all the organizations involved. In Ukraine in 2004, exit polls
suggested fraud, but a PVT did not support this conclusion. Such discrepancies
can hurt the credibility of election monitoring.
To me it is clear that
there is basically nothing against the existence of both tools for a given
election so long as each is used primarily for what it does best. For us
Myanmars, I felt we need both, as we are short of reliable information relating
to every part of our lives.
Well, there is at least one example of conflict between the
locals and an outsider, or shall we say "People vs. Margate House
Films"? Every
vote must be counted, every voice must be heard is the name of the post
by Rob Allyn, that appeared in Mandala, July 16, 2014. Rob Allyn is Chairman of
Margate House, which handled TV ads for Jokowi’s 2012 campaign for Governor of
Jakarta and the Prabowo-Hatta bid for the Presidency in 2014.
Allyn said:
Much has been written by conspiracy
theorists and crackpot websites about our work for democracy in Indonesia,
where our firm handled media campaigns both for Jokowi’s 2012 victory and
Prabowo-Hatta’s 2014 presidential campaign – the results of which have yet to
be counted, verified and released. A few academics and journalists have been
misled by this wildly inaccurate Internet chatter as they make a case for
deciding the election based on so-called “quick counts” (produced by private
pollsters on Jokowi’s campaign team). ...
To those who declare this election over based
on alleged “quick counts” produced by members Jokowi’s campaign team, let us
remember these key facts:
·
Quick counts represent less than half of 1% of voters (some
2,000 voting places out of 480,000+ across the vast archipelago of the world’s
third-largest democracy).
·
The pollsters producing those quick counts (based on less than
½%), as well as the head of Indonesia’s polling association, are all members of
Jokowi’s campaign.
·
These same Jokowi-team “quick count” pollsters were cited by
Aaron Connelly and other distinguished academics and journalists for refusing
to disclose their poll results in June, for fear they would reveal Prabowo’s
30-point gain in the race.
·
Inarguably, awarding the election based on quick counts of ½% by
Jokowi’s pollsters completely disenfranchises more than 99.5% of Indonesian
voters.
·
That’s not democracy. In a true democracy, every vote must be
counted, every ballot must be recorded, and every voice must be heard.
There were altogether 72 comments, most overwhelmingly
against him. Here are a few.
Monique:
... You have confirmed my belief in publicily-funded
elections, and the complete and total banning of all public or private
commercial political advertising. We see what it does to the electoral process.
It degrades and impugns it.
Aaron Connelly:
... I’d recommend reading Diane Zhang’s breakdown of the
quick count numbers and what they mean (http://electionwatch.edu.au/indonesia-2014/what-basis-jokowis-claim-presidency).
But if at this late stage you still don’t understand how quick counts work, if
you still don’t understand that Jokowi won the most votes last week, I am not
sure that I or anyone else here can help you.
danau:
Why is a reputable research institution like the ANU
publishing this piece? It is an advertising piece and a PR manoeuver for
Margate House/Rob Allyn. Where is the scholarly critique to go with this piece?
As for Rob Allyn, he can say all he wants about “working for
democracy” but it is rhetorical (in the same way that much of what Prabowo says
is empty rhetoric). If Allyn really was a champion for democracy the way he
makes himself out to be in this piece, he would have done some background check
about Prabowo before offering him Margate House’s services for his presidential
campaign.
But their actions suggest that Margate House/Rob Allyn is not
about democracy – instead, they are about profit. Either that, or they are very
naive about the precariousness of Indonesia’s young democracy. ...
Tempodulu:
Beware of this deceit!!!! Rob
Allyn is basically saying that statics sampling is a load of old baloney –
WHICH IT IS NOT. Quick counts do take small samples, but the beauty of
statistics is that they are EXTREMELY ACCURATE in predicting outcomes. In fact,
the truth is that you only need a small sample size of around 1,500 people and
you could accurately determine the percentage of Indonesians who prefer Jokowi
or Prawbowo. Quick counts predict election results so accurately that in most
countries they are taken as the final result (with a small margin of error). In
Indonesia, all the IMPARTIAL quick counts were very similar, which backs this
simple truth – JOKOWI circa 52-53%, Prabowo circa 47-48%. If Prabowo were to
win the election, this would actually violate the rules of mathematics – a
remarkable achievement by anyone. Perhaps Stephen Hawking might get interested!
Angrymagpie:
Now Kompas is running a story about Rob’s
voice; basically summarised Rob Allyn’s article here without mentioning the
fierce criticism it receives from the readers of New Mandala. I hope this won’t
be used by some people to falsify an air of Rob Allyn neutrality &
professionalism, or even victimhood.
http://indonesiasatu.kompas.com/read/2014/07/16/13141361/konsultan.kampanye.prabowo.asal.as.buka.suara?utm_source=WP&utm_medium=box&utm_campaign=Khlwp
http://indonesiasatu.kompas.com/read/2014/07/16/13141361/konsultan.kampanye.prabowo.asal.as.buka.suara?utm_source=WP&utm_medium=box&utm_campaign=Khlwp
danau:
I share Angrymagpie’s concerns. (Hence my
multiple posts!) Merdeka is also citing ANU’s website for publishing Allyn’s
post. Thankfully Merdeka has taken the time to ask for comments from Made
Supriatma, who has offered some critique. But Merdeka has wrongly attributed
the italicize two line introduction to Allyn (but did not mention the purpose
of the publication – for public response). And they say that Allyn posted this
from the US, when he clearly states that he has gone back to the US. Luckily,
they have only made minor misinterpretations…for now.
Mara Dyer:
Mr. Allyn? Your client
lost…Given his notorious temper and well-known habit for pulling out his hand
gun during an argument, I sincerely hope you are no longer in Indonesia. If you
are still here, a word of advice: RUN!
So far this selection of comments has necessarily been subjective.
Better read the post yourselves.
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