By Gab O
With regards to opinion polls.
1. You cannot conduct opinion polls yesterday and release the results today. Even if your sampling frame was Jimo village, which has less than 300 households, you will need at least 7 days to process and analyse your data for public consumption.
2. Tom Wolfe base was the adult population. Angela Ambitho’s base was the voting population. Two different sampling methodologies, both of which are flawed.
Of the two, Tom Wolfe’s methodology is the worst. You cannot dispense a voter questionnaire on a non-voter respondent. If I am not a registered voter in this election, you have no business asking me who I will vote for. For Angela Ambitho, unless you have proof that your respondent is a voter (and not by word of mouth), your margin of error is way more than what is reported there.
3. The media needs to be trained on research methods. It doesn’t mean that we are headed for a run-off because Uhuru and Raila haven’t met the 50%+1 threshold in the opinion polls. If elections were held today all registered voters will be eligible to vote including those saying they’re still undecided.
Thank you.
