Afraid of surveys?

The Supreme Court’s Tuesday ruling on surveys tries to be nice to both sides—the Commission on Elections as it calls for more transparency from election survey groups, and the leading polling groups in the country, as they insist on the integrity of surveys and their independence from government regulation. The Court basically said: Yes, Comelec, you can force them to disclose their sponsors and methodologies, but just don’t punish the Social Weather Stations and Pulse Asia for failing to do so in the 2013 elections. That may seem Solomonic at first blush, but actually it merely sends the wrong signals.

Let us put this in historical context. This is not the first time that the Supreme Court is addressing the power of surveys. The past two times, it categorically recognized their role in Philippine democracy. In 2000, the Court struck down the Comelec’s attempt to ban the conduct of exit surveys, when the Comelec said that these polls sowed confusion among voters, eroded confidence in the official Comelec count, and potentially fomented “violence and anarchy.” In 2001, the Court set aside the Comelec ban on the publication of election surveys right before Election Day, 15 days prior for national candidates and seven days for local candidates.

The Supreme Court has consistently recognized the power of exit polls and election surveys as, in the words of Justice Artemio Panganiban, “vital tools in eliminating the evils of election-fixing and fraud.” The Court has likewise confronted the “bandwagon effect” of election surveys, and how these surveys undermine the democratic process by fostering the “junking” of weak candidates by their parties. Justice Vicente Mendoza said: “It is doubtful whether the government can deal with this natural-enough tendency of some voters. Some voters want to be identified with the ‘winners.’ Some are susceptible to the herd mentality. Can these be legitimately prohibited by suppressing the publication of survey results which are a form of expression … so vital to the maintenance of democratic institutions[?]”

In this latest battle before the Court, the Comelec tried to make election surveys more transparent by requiring the polling firm to disclose who had commissioned the survey, its methodology and margin of error. The Comelec also required the polling firm to make its raw data available for inspection.

Apparently, this part of the decision has been satisfied, and the survey firms have made the required disclosures. Indeed, the Social Weather Stations posts this information even for commissioned surveys as soon as the sponsor publicizes the survey results. The only sticking point that remains, it seems, is that the Comelec has adopted an overbroad definition of “who commissions the survey” to include the paying “subscribers,” who, just like newspaper or magazine patrons, pay a fee and receive regular updates from the survey firm. The Comelec argues that these “subscribers” are “indirectly, yet effectively, the ‘payors’ of the surveys.”

Both the Supreme Court and the Comelec are in error here. The so-called “subscribers” are passive receivers of information. They have absolutely no hand, no editorial control, so to speak, in what survey will be conducted, or where, when and how it will be done. They simply receive survey updates periodically as part of their “subscription.” Surely their fees help defray the operations of the survey firms, but that doesn’t put them on the same footing as actual sponsors. Indeed, these fees help the survey firms conduct their own “self-funded” surveys which, given the Comelec’s wariness of sponsored surveys, the Comelec should support even more.

And that is the fundamental question that the Court, in the manner of the learned justices who had earlier ruled on election surveys and exit polls, should have asked. Why fear the commissioned survey? Because having been paid for by a sponsor, the results will necessarily favor that sponsor? That premise fails to understand the nature of surveys. A candidate who commissions a survey wants to find out if he/she is ahead or losing; he/she doesn’t pay to hear just what he/she wants to hear. There are enough flatterers and flunkies who will do that more cheaply. If the problem is the manipulated survey, the solution is not really to announce the name of the sponsor, but to explain the methodology of the survey.

In other words, the credibility of a survey lies less on who paid for it, and more on the scientific integrity of the survey itself.