WHEN THE seven presidential candidates stood in the line-up at the start of Monday night's edition of The Frontline, the audience already had a clear sense of there being two front-runners, a couple of kingmakers, and two or three candidates at the bottom with no hope of winning.
This represented a departure from the principles of democratic elections, in which all candidates ought to compete on an equal footing. The Constitution provides for the election of president by secret ballot, but can the ballot be deemed “secret” if, yesterday morning when I walked into the polling booth, I already “knew”, on the basis of a series of quota-controlled sampling exercises, that Dana, Mary Davis, Gay Mitchell and David Norris had no chance of becoming president?
Of course, this is how all elections are conducted nowadays, with opinion polls providing voters with a running graph purporting to tell them, over the course of the campaign, how other voters are thinking of voting. But custom and practice do not make something right.
This election has put this issue into sharp relief. In a general election, the issue tends to be less conspicuous, since the protagonists are mainly the political parties, and we tend to think of these as being engaged in a continuous battle for favour, in which fortunes change on an incremental basis all the time. It is also arguable that, where parties are concerned, the effect of polls involves a swings-and-roundabouts element of fairness.
This election has cast the issue in a different light, because the majority of candidates were Independents, with only three of the seven having the backing of party machines.
To run for president is a tremendous undertaking, and a costly one. Since the stakes for candidates are so high, and since most of them came to the contest without the burden of any previous relevant electoral performances, they were surely entitled to arrive at polling day without the electorate having by that time a sense that some of them had already “failed”.
Most voters nowadays take polls for granted, while giving little thought to how they are conducted or what effects they may be having.
Indeed, the outcomes of polls are treated by all concerned as a kind of gospel of voter intentionality. It is as though a series of “primaries” is being conducted, providing voters with a running guide to the notional progress and popularity of candidates. Opinion polls provide, in a manner somewhat analogous to primaries, information about how the electorate might be thinking, but, being conducted according to a cybernetic procedure, they do so in a manner devoid of the imprimatur of a democratic process. Such polls do not – should not – have the status of primary elections and in our system the only legitimate measure of the popularity of candidates is the one taken on voting day. A quota-controlled sample may be scientific and reliable, but it is not a democratic instrument.
And yet opinion polling has acquired an overwhelming sway over our elections, transforming them into events that take place over the course not of single days, but weeks or sometimes months. In that time, we are enabled – metaphorically speaking – to look over one another’s shoulders to see what we are scribbling on our notional voting slips.
This unquestionably leads to bandwagoning, and to the effective elimination of some candidates who are presented by the polls as having fallen behind long before polling day dawns.
Voting day ought to be sacrosanct: a day when voters go into the quietude of the booth and express a preference uncontaminated by any sense of what others have decided. The criteria to be applied should derive from the characteristics and qualities of the candidates, and their views on the various relevant issues, not from any sense of an anticipated outcome arrived at in a procedure which is not formally part of the democratic process.
Polls are not neutral phenomena, but undoubtedly function as organic catalysts. In the course of this campaign, we have seen some candidates, having flowered briefly, falling behind to the point where it seemed that the election was already over for them. On the other hand, we have seen one candidate, who started out as a political unknown, sprinting to the front and edging dramatically ahead. However things turn out, it can hardly be denied that the polls were a driving element in this election, highlighting and accelerating trends that otherwise might not have become definitive.
This is not an argument that opinion polls are unscientific or unreliable, but perhaps closer to the opposite: that, by virtue of their reliability, a shadow-version of electoral opinion becomes mixed up in the democratic process to the extent of pre-empting, perhaps even pre-deciding, the actual result. The constant flow of polled information provides an unwarranted monitoring mechanism for voters which gives them a distorted sense of a continuing “race” – based not on an objective sense of the candidates’ capability, but rather on the projection of an artificial measurement derived from the application of an arcane theory of statistical probability.