Dear Editor,
I am responding to Freddie Kissoon’s letter captioned `Bisram Got it Wrong’ (SN Jan 27). Freddie has a penchant for distortions and this letter was no different. Freddie made references to the NACTA polls in Grenada (2008) and Trinidad on the UNC internal elections. I will pen a separate response on Grenada because I am awaiting the official results to make a comparison with the poll’s findings. I can assure readers, I tell no lies.
In Trinidad, there was a series of pre-election polls and an election day “exit” poll. Freddie is wrong about his conclusions of the polls. The pre-election poll clearly stated that it could not predict a winner because of the difficulties of identifying who would vote. The exit poll was right. However, Freddie would not have known about the exit prediction because it was only stated on the air and not printed.
While Freddie cited polling numbers, he did not give all the numbers and the conditionalities attached to them. That is outright dishonest. In addition, the numbers cited by Freddie were not the latest. I did a series of tracking polls on the elections. One of them did capture a landslide victory for Ms. Kamla Persad Bissessar but subsequent polls showed her support slipping.
Conducting any poll is a difficult exercise. Conducting a poll in which 35,000 are eligible to vote out of a voting population of one million is an even more difficult task. It was a near impossible exercise to determine who could vote in the internal elections and make a proper assessment of the outcome. Hence the reason for the NACTA poll stating it was unable to predict a winner well ahead of the election when I was asked by media personnel who would win. But on Saturday evening, the NACTA poll declared that Kamla would be the winner although admittedly not by the huge margin of victory it turned out.
At no time except in the final poll on Saturday evening before voting and on the air on Sunday (Radio Jagriti and CNC 3 TV) did I identify a winner indicating that Kamla Persad Bissessar would win by a landslide.
The last tracking poll released Saturday evening identified Bissessar as the winner but not by the margin she won. The poll had Bissessar with 15% lead over Basdeo Panday and Ramesh Lawrence Maharaj out of the race with a 6% margin of error.
So Freddie is wrong that I did not predict the winner. A competent political scientist would want to know why the poll was unable to estimate in pre-election surveys the huge margin of victory. There were two types of members among the eligible 35,000 voters – loyalist UNCites (estimated at 25,000) and dual COPites (estimated at 10,000). It was not certain that COPites would vote because the membership committee said they were not eligible to cast ballots although their names remained on the list. The final poll estimated Bissessar getting 78% COPites and 23% UNCites. The poll did not say Bissessar would get 23% support but a combination of both. The poll said if COPites voted, Bissessar would win by a landslide. Everyone was allowed to vote regardless of affiliation and that is why the exit poll was able to call Bissessar’s landslide victory long before the voting ended.
Clearly Bissessar got more than 23% UNCites. And a solid political scientist would want to know why this discrepancy instead of attacking the pollster. Panday and Bissessar claim there were a lot of discrepancies on the voters list. Panday said the electoral process was sabotaged. His staff found thousands of membership cards hidden in the party’s office. Thousands of voters were turned away from the polling stations. I found in my exit poll investigations that those turned away were divided between Panday and Bissessar. The electoral process was seriously flawed. The party was not ready for the elections. But this should not take away from Bissessar’s magnificent victory. Voters told me they wanted change in an anti-incumbency political environment.
Regardless of the outcome, I made a sincere effort to determine peoples’ views on the elections and issued the reports accordingly. I also wish to note that I do not tell lies. I did not lie about the number of people who attended a much hyped lecture at UG. I did not lie making up information that Bisram does not teach in NY. I did not lie about what was discussed at a conference in Miami. I did not lie about stolen books. And I have not lied about Grenada.
Yours faithfully,
Vishnu Bisram
