Nowadays, the 2020 Taiwan region leader and "legislator" elections are approaching, and various primary elections and bottom-line polls are emerging one after another. Which polling company is more professional? Digital phone users should still be included in mobile phone users.

Source: Overseas Network

Original title: Spending hundreds of millions and falsifying data, how deep is Taiwan’s polling situation?

Nowadays, the 2020 Taiwan region leader and "legislator" elections are approaching, and various primary elections and bottom-line polls are emerging one after another. Which polling company is more professional? Is there any "water injection" in the data? Should the poll only target phone users or include mobile phone users? What are the proportions of mobile phone and phone users? These issues have become the focus of public opinion on the island.

So, how did Taiwan’s polls come about? Is it trustworthy? The reporter specially visited the polling center on the island to find out.

The earliest public opinion polls in Taiwan appeared around the late 1980s. At that time, some "legislators" would ask professional organizations to conduct opinion polls to understand the administrative agencies' satisfaction with their governance, so that they could be used in questioning. In 1990, the "Taiwan Gallup Polling Company" imported from the United States was the first commercial polling company on the island. In 1993, the then chairman of the Democratic Progressive Party Xu Xinliang introduced polling into the auxiliary election system, trying to grasp the county and mayor elections that year through quantitative polling numbers. Since then, political parties and candidates on the island have increasingly chosen to use opinion polls to understand the election situation. Various polling companies are also emerging in large numbers.

Why are polling centers popping up like mushrooms in Taiwan? The reason lies in three words: Make money. For example, it costs a candidate 150,000 to 180,000 yuan (NT$, the same below) to conduct a poll. If he can successfully qualify, he will conduct multiple polls before the election is over. In Taiwan, there are more than 20 local county and city chiefs, more than 900 county and city councilors, and more than 100 "legislators." The corresponding candidates have to be multiplied by 3 to 5 times. In total, these candidates will be polled. It will cost hundreds of millions or even billions of dollars. The cake is so big, why not take a piece of it?

How are Taiwan polls generated? First, the computer system of the polling center records the first few digits of the landline or mobile phone number (especially for landlines, the first few digits of a certain district in a city or a certain town in a county are the same). After that, the system will randomly draw the following numbers. After dialing the number, the operator of the polling company will announce their home address, then ask the respondents about their household registration, and then ask for their answers to specific questions.

For example, if the subject of the survey is the 2020 Taiwan leader election, the operator will ask, if so-and-so, so-and-so and so-and-so are running for election, assuming tomorrow is the voting day, who are you more likely to vote for? One person? Alternative answers include the name of the specific candidate, do not support it, have not decided yet, have no opinion, etc. After asking a few questions, the operator will ask the respondent about his age, education, ethnicity, gender and other personal information.

According to statistical research, when the sample size of the survey is 1068, the result error can be kept within 3%. For example, if a candidate's poll result is 35%, the actual result is likely to be between 32% and 38%.

Polls are very important for elections, but they have been controversial since the first day they were introduced to Taiwan. Some people even directly said: Polls are not trustworthy. This is why?

When talking about controversy, the first thing to mention is the issue of sample selection: How to balance phone users and mobile phone users? It's an issue that's hotly contested among politicians on the island. Since many young people on the island only use mobile phones, the probability of finding young people is very low if the polling agency conducts exclusive interviews only through landlines. Statistics show that when operators made calls to 1,000 landline phones, they found only about 70 young people. Therefore, if only landline telephones are used for polling, it will be difficult to understand the opinions of young people, and the final results may be biased.

In this case, why do some polls still not include mobile phone users? It turns out that the phone can determine the user's registered place through the area code and the first few numbers, but the mobile phone number cannot identify the user's registered place. If you want to collect samples from a specific county, city or constituency, you can quickly do it by phone sampling, but you can't judge it by using a mobile phone. In addition, the way and order in which survey questions are asked, and the answers set may also affect the respondent's judgment.

In addition to technical deviations, sometimes some polling organizations with specific positions will conduct fake polls. They may increase the support of candidates in the same camp to show that the candidate is popular and worthy of everyone's vote; or they may deliberately do so. Boosting the opponent's support in the polls and paralyzing the opponent's camp, thinking that the candidate is sure to win, so he may not be short of his own vote, but in the end he loses the election. As for whether to outshine yourself or your opponents, it requires detailed analysis of the specific situation.

In response to the above issues, the person in charge of the TVBS Polling Center believes that if polls are used to determine the results of the party's primary election, regardless of whether mobile phone users are included or what the proportion is, as long as each political party reaches consensus within the party or votes to pass the corresponding method, Candidates generally comply. Rather than having flaws in the rules, what everyone is more afraid of is the lack of rules. At the same time, in order to make the results as fair as possible, relevant political parties often choose 3 to 5 polling companies for evaluation, and finally calculate the average of the results to reduce errors.

After the primary election, polls can only be used as a reference for candidates and voters. I am afraid that only the final voter voting results are the true reflection of public opinion. At the same time, in order to prevent the release of polls from interfering with voters' voting intentions, according to the current regulations in Taiwan, agencies are not allowed to release any more polls within ten days before the polling day. (Text/Peach Blossom Island Owner)