Leading Russian pollster rejects opposition hopeful’s figures for mayoral vote

Aerial View of Moscow From Beyond Stadium, file photo

(Interfax – Moscow, August 20, 2013) The opinion poll data published by Moscow mayoral candidate (from the opposition RPR-Parnas party) Aleksey Navalnyy, which indicate that a second round is possible in the mayoral election on 8 September, do not reflect the real balance of forces and are dictated by the wish to influence voters, VTsIOM (Russian Public Opinion Research Centre) director-general Valeriy Fedorov believes.

“All the campaign teams conduct polls but for some reason only Navalnyy’s publishes the results,” Fedorov said in an interview to the National News Service (NSN). “In my view, what we have here is not the desire to find out what voters really think but the desire to influence their opinion. Navalnyy’s current rating is obviously very low, this is clearly not what he hoped for,” the sociologist said.

“There is not much time left before the election, so supporters have to be spurred on, infused with the certainty that it still makes sense to turn out on 8 September and vote for their candidate. In my view, it is with this aim that reports about these ratings are being thrown in,” Fedorov said.

“It is laughable to discuss how close to, or far from, reality Navalnyy’s rating from Navalnyy’s campaign team is. It is inflated to more than double the real figure, while the rating of (acting Moscow mayor Sergey) Sobyanin is marked down by more than 10 percentage points. Unfortunately, there is no straightforward information on how this poll was conducted,” the VTsIOM director-general stressed.

“All one can read on their websites is that the poll is taken in the street. They train volunteers from Navalnyy’s team, who go out into the street and ask people questions. This method is acceptable but it produces shifts, and these shifts are one-directional, in favour of the younger, more active sections of the electorate. The results therefore naturally shift in Navalnyy’s favour. Then they manipulate this data so as to inspire their supporters and show that he has not lost yet,” the sociologist said.

Earlier, Navalnyy published in his blog the data from his campaign team, which show acting Moscow mayor Sergey Sobyanin 19 percentage points ahead of the opposition activist: the former has the support of 44 per cent of those polled by the team and the latter, 25 per cent.

Comment