Quality of exit polls worsening, Hong Kong pollster says

The quality of exit polls is being watered down by a slew of new competing entrants and political interference, an established Hong Kong pollster said.

Dr Robert Chung Ting-yiu, who heads the University of Hong Kong’s public opinion programme, also cited a lack of resources and general support from both the government and media for his institution’s decision to pull out of the Legislative Council election exit polls this Sunday.

The long-time provider of exit polls will not be collecting data for future academic research or real-time projections, but will instead run a “voluntary student project” at about 50 stations for this Sunday’s race.

“We had hoped to establish a good exit poll mechanism in Hong Kong. But after so many years, it seems to have failed. The government doesn’t respect professional exit polling development and is not willing to safeguard it,” Chung said in a Commercial Radio talk show.

He believed the ideal model would be the one adopted in the United States, where a few selected media outlets work with just one organisation that is allowed to conduct official exit polls inside stations.

This would help avoid voters being suspicious of whom they are providing data to or how it would be used – a prevalent problem in Hong Kong elections, Chung said.