Polling in SA is a mess, if not a scandal. In Brazil, Canada, the UK, Australia and elsewhere polling is regulated. If you publish polling results you are obliged to make public your method. Not so in SA. Anyone can say they’ve conducted a poll and release the findings, and if you ask how they reached their conclusions they are not obliged to show you.
We have in SA a natural experiment in what happens in a world without regulation. The results sometimes border on the comic. When Change Starts Now released the results of the poll it commissioned in February it failed to reallocate nonresponses, in effect fabricating a new party with 18% of the vote. The Brenthurst Foundation’s poll carried glaring internal contradictions — a 10-minute exercise in simple arithmetic rendered some of its key results puzzling. We are not talking here about fine differences of interpretation, but of work that is just bad.
The latest polling body guilty of opacity is Ipsos (“MK and EFF may net a combined 20% voter share, Ipsos survey finds”, April 30). It tells us, among other things, that the ANC is polling at just over 40%, the DA at 21.9%, the EFF at 11.5%, and MK at 8.4%. But it does not tell us whether it has adjusted for turnout; on the face of it, it appears to assume (although this is just a guess as it will not say) that more than 27-million people will cast their ballots, a presumption so far from reality that the numbers are meaningless.
That is just one of the problems with the Ipsos poll. It has ANC support holding steady since the spectacular emergence of MK, but EFF support falling off a cliff face, from 19.6% to 11.5%. Did MK really steal nearly half of the EFF’s support base and nothing from the ANC? Surely not. There are a couple of improbable explanations for this strange finding, but Ipsos does not share them. Indeed, the accompanying commentary makes no reference at all to what seems a glaring anomaly. One is left with the suspicion that there is something wrong with the data.
The media are also to blame. The results of each poll are reported with bluff innocence. I have not come across a single reporter digging into the numbers, or calling pollsters out for flagrant contradictions, or even just pointing out that most of these polls, with the exception of Ipsos, are not independent because they are funded by bodies that also fund political parties.
The fault lies with editors, not with reporters. It wouldn’t take much for a publication to equip one reporter with a set of tools to interrogate surveys. It would not even cost any money. I’m pretty certain there are social scientists out there who would do it for free as a public service.
Why does any of this matter? Poll results are reported faithfully by the media and discussed across the country because they have been conducted by experts. When what is offered is obviously questionable, and we still insist on discussing it seriously, the whole country begins to look foolish.
That is why polling in SA requires regulation. This is a serious country with self-respect. Its national elections are a solemn and sacred business. Those polling how citizens plan to vote should be required to respect the gravity of the ritual they have deigned to gauge.
There is another reason this matters. Across the world expertise is in crisis. We recently came out of a global pandemic and there are untold millions of people who did not believe the experts who urged them to get vaccinated. A frighteningly large minority of the most powerful democracy in the world believes its last presidential election was rigged, and the experts who tell them otherwise are dismissed as partisan liars.
The last thing the world needs is experts who are coy with their data and method; experts who won’t show us whether their work is rigorous because they are in an unregulated environment. More than ever, those who work with numbers bear a heavy burden of responsibility.
• Steinberg teaches at Yale University’s Council on African Studies.
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