The Public Editor is back, smack in the middle of heated campaigns.
Campaign fever gripped the country long before the Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission declared the official campaign period.
The stakes are high and opinion is sharply divided. The Star has been trying to get the public’s opinion through its monthly opinion polls, which look at various issues among them the most preferred presidential candidates
The results of opinion polls never go down well with politicians and the public, more so if their side is trailing.
But are opinion polls necessary and do they mirror the real situation on the ground?
Opinion polling did not start yesterday and the first poll dates way back to 1824 in the US. It simply looked at voter preferences in that year’s election, which pitted Andrew Jackson against Quincy Jones Adams. It captured Jackson leading Adams by 335 votes to 169.
Jackson went ahead to win and with time such polls became popular, with some publications partly adopting them as a circulation-raising exercise.
In Kenya, opinion polling dates back to the Sixties but became more popular upon the reintroduction of multi-party politics in 1992.
In a paper titled 'The History and Impact of Opinion Polling in Kenya', Charles Hornsby makes reference to a poll conducted in January 1961 on the Central Nairobi seat that gave Kanu’s Tom Mboya 67.5 per cent of the vote against Martin Shikuku’s 25.6 per cent and Munyua Waiyaki’s seven per cent.
Mboya went ahead to capture 90 per cent of the vote, showing that whilst polls could predict the winner, they could not predict the margin.
Private or public institutions can conduct opinion polls and the primary motivation of pollsters may vary.
These include, but are not limited to, public knowledge and entertainment, income generation, civic education, strategic planning, campaign weapons, and lobbying and as a linkage between institutions/politicians and society.
According to Radio Africa Group Head of content Paul Ilado, media houses have been flooded with questionable polls every election year.
He says politicians seeking to raise their profile have discovered that frequent polling on newsworthy topics can get a lot of attention, but not all of those polls deserve to be published.
Ilado explains that the group’s decision to publish polls every month opens the door for higher professional standards in the industry.
The polls conducted by Radio Africa’s research department will culminate in August.
“It doesn't take much to conduct a poll these days, but it does take quite a lot of care to conduct one well,” he says.
Ilado says credible opinion polls are critical in a democratic process.
The Electoral Opinion Polls Act clearly sets the yardstick for opinion polls.
The pollster must publish the methodology used, which at Radio Africa is the Computer-Aided Telephone Interview (CATI).
The fieldwork dates and sample size of the poll must equally be stated and the sampling methodology, which for the Star polls is random and based on proportionate population, and size across the 47 counties.
Pollsters rely on the IEBC register to ensure those polled are registered voters who are Kenyan citizens aged 18 years and above.
As per the law, the pollster must publish who funded the poll. The Star's opinion polls are fully funded by its parent company—Radio Africa Group.
Also required by the law is that the sampling error and the language used for an opinion poll must be clearly stated
Before embarking on conducting the polls, the group took all its journalists through a detailed training on reporting of opinion polls.
In its election coverage manual, the Media Council of Kenya emphasises that to ensure validity and reliability of opinion polls, they have to be done according to proven scientific methods and must adhere to the Electoral Opinion Polls Act.
The MCK however cautions that results from short messaging service (SMS) polls on broadcasting stations and digital platforms are not scientific and the audience should be duly informed.
The World Association for Public Opinion Research on other hand notes that the following questions should guide journalists on the credibility of any survey.
Who commissioned the survey? Who paid for it? Why was the survey commissioned? Who conducted the survey? What geographical areas were covered? and What was the sample size?
They should also establish how representative was the sample? What sampling methods were used? What was the response and non-response rate? What kinds of questions were asked? What calibre of staff was involved in the data gathering? Over what period was the survey conducted? What was the margin of error? and What were the results?
Unless an opinion poll answers these questions, then chances that it has been cooked to drive a particular agenda are very high.
Politicians are desperate during election time and will stop at nothing to tilt the public support in their favour; several have planted fake opinion polls to sway public perception.
Going by the set parameters, the Radio Africa Group polls remain credible and the Public Editor can vouch for them.
But remember that opinion polls are just but an opinion and the final decision at the ballot box is solely yours.
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