SHILLONG, Feb 28: Country’s best known professional election strategists, IPAC (Indian Political Action Committee) which was hired by TMC for doing ground work in Meghalaya, has dismissed the exit poll findings as “off the mark”.
IPAC, which parked its trained workers spread across the length and breadth of Meghalaya for over a year, believes that the final count will provide a different scenario.
“The exit polls are way off the mark. It is hard to believe, and the numbers don’t just add up,” said IPAC co-founder and Director, Pratik Jain while speaking to The Shillong Times here on Tuesday.
Exit polls by various national TV channels have two common denominators — a hung assembly and NPP as the single largest party.
Jain who was overseeing the Meghalaya elections on behalf of TMC, observed that reputed agencies like Axis have done the exit polls for TV channels but they have not been able to catch the true pulse of the voters and have not got it right.
According to him, unlike elsewhere in the country, it is very hard to predict in Meghalaya by conventional sample surveys, since there are many remote areas and small sized constituencies, apart from the language barrier.
Stating that he is not saying that TMC or UDP should have been projected better, he said, “I feel the exit polls have been done simply for the sake of doing and it is way off the mark”.
Asked for his own predictions, he refused to reveal them saying that it is way different from the numbers projected in the exit polls.
