Elections – Verifying Results

Quick Counts

Quick Count is a method for verification of election results by projecting them from a sample of the polling stations. Different than the exit poll, voters are not asked who they voted for, projection of results is based on official results of the polling station. Parallel vote tabulation is similar to quick count but uses whole data instead of samples.

Exit polls

An election exit poll is a poll of voters taken immediately after they have exited the polling stations. Unlike an opinion poll, which asks whom the voter plans to vote for or some similar formulation, an exit poll asks whom the voter actually voted for. A similar poll conducted before actual voters have voted is called an entrance poll. Pollsters – usually private companies working for newspapers or broadcasters – conduct exit polls to gain an early indication as to how an election has turned out, as in many elections the actual result may take hours or even days to count.

Exit poll survey responses are sometimes aggregated to project election results. These projections are broadly indicative of voter intent and can be compared to official results. Because of the degree of uncertainty inherent in using data reported from voters, exit poll results can be used to assess but not conclusively verify results.

Exit polls can generate important information about voters’ perceptions of how elections were run and any problems that may have occurred. Exit polls have historically and throughout the world been used as a check against and rough indicator of the degree of election fraud. Some examples of this include the Venezuelan recall referendum, 2004, and the Ukrainian presidential election, 2004.

Problems

In some settings, voters may not respond accurately to survey interviewers. This “falsification error” occurs because voters do not trust the motives of the interviewer or they fear reprisals for reporting their vote. Rather than accurately reporting how they voted, voters might provide the response they think is “correct” from the point of view of an authority. Also, because voters have to agree to participate, exit polls suffer from “nonresponse error,” a specific selection bias caused by voters unwilling to take part in the survey.

The Parallel Vote Tabulation

The Parallel Vote Tabulation (PVT) is an election observation methodology that is employed for independent verification (or challenge) of election results. It involves observation of the voting and counting of ballots at the polling stations, collection of official polling station results and independent tabulation of these results, parallel to election authorities.

If the PVT is performed on statistical sample of the polling stations, it is called Quick Count.

Organizers from the Philippine National Citizen Movement for Free Elections (NAMFREL) are widely recognized as the pioneers of the quick count, or parallel vote tabulation (PVT), in emerging democracies. During a 1986 election for President, NAMFREL attempted to mirror the official count of all 90,000 polling stations. They performed a remarkable task in collecting data from the majority of polling stations, and they were instrumental in helping uncover the massive vote counting fraud attempted by Marcos supporters.

Sources : Source : USAID. Assessing And Verifying Election Results: A Decision-Maker’s Guide To Parallel Vote Tabulation And Other Tools (USAID 2015); National Democratic Institute. A Background On Pvts/Quick Counts. https://www.ndi.org/node/21694