What are exit polls?
Most popular events in India are elections and IPL. Elections in India, the biggest democracy in the world, decide the fate of 17.5% of the world's population. Several organizations try to predict results of both parliamentary and state legislative assemblies. When there are almost 2000 political parties, it is difficult to accurately estimate which party would form the Government, let alone number of seats.
Still, many media houses try to forecast the results by conducting "exit-polls". To conduct such poll journalists or people hired by firms ask voters coming out of polling booths after casting their ballots about their choice and why they made that certain choice. This data, typically collected from hundreds of booths, will be compiled to draw conclusions.
How accurate are these exit polls?
Here we look at exit poll results calculated by several agencies and compare them with the results of the elections conducted for the recent state assemblies in February-March 2022. In the graphs below, we consider two top parties/alliances in the respective states and measure how accurate are their projections.
Uttar Pradesh Assembly Elections 2022
Although all the agencies predicted the winner of the elections, none of the actual seats won have come in the range of their predictions. "Today's Chanakya"s polls are the closest to the results.
Uttarakhand Assembly Elections 2022
For the Uttarakhand elections, only "Today's Chanakya"s predictions came close to the results.
But that estimate has the highest error margin. As observed in the graph, for example, it predcited Congress would
win any number of seats between 17 and 31. That's not a great precision!
ABP News - CVoter's could not even predict who would win the election correctly.
Irrespective of their inaccuracies, these polls attract a lot of attention and bring high TRPs(Television Rating Points) to these media firms.