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Quick count equal to an informed guess

An independent elections monitoring body hailed the instant vote tallying method known as “quick counts”, saying that it could work as a vehicle for public participation and part of the democratic process

The Jakarta Post
Jakarta
Fri, April 11, 2014

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Quick count equal to an informed guess

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n independent elections monitoring body hailed the instant vote tallying method known as '€œquick counts'€, saying that it could work as a vehicle for public participation and part of the democratic process.

Association for Elections and Democracy (Perludem) executive director Veri Junaidi said on Thursday that quick counts conducted by a number of Jakarta-based pollsters helped bring transparency to the electoral process.

'€œIf the quick count and the official results don'€™t add up, we could begin questioning the results from either process. We have something to compare against,'€ Veri added.

With the public eager to get preliminary results soon after polls are closed, the quick count method of vote sampling was first introduced during the presidential election in 1999 and caught on during the 2004 direct presidential election.

Yet many people are still questioning the validity of quick counts.

The quick count is a prediction method in statistics that uses sampling that has no tangible implication in the real world. It is a calculation that contains a margin of error and is therefore only good for making predictions.

If the margin of error is small, it means that any other institution carrying out similar research would likely come up with similar results.

To guarantee a valid result, pollsters have gone the extra mile.

Djayadi Hanan, the research director at the Saiful Mujani Research and Consulting (SMRC) firm, said that for its quick count, the pollster recruited and trained 2,000 surveyors, equipping them with cell phones with special numbers and deployed them to 2,000 polling stations nationwide.

The surveyors then relayed the real-time count by election officials back to an IT data center after the polls closed. The results were then analyzed to produce an '€œaccurate'€ prediction of the final official tally, which is the quick count result.

To monitor the work of these surveyors and prevent a large margin of error, the institution sent 200 supervisors to 200 randomly-selected polling stations from the survey sample to do a '€œspot check'€ in places that have reported data irregularities.

Additionally, surveyors were stationed at polling stations where they were not registered so as to insure they maintain independence while still being able to vote.

'€œSMRC [and other independent survey institutions] are obliged to promote transparency in the sampling, the questioning, quality control and funding of its operations,'€ Djayadi told The Jakarta Post on Thursday, adding that the public could access the information on a real-time basis, as mandated by the General Elections Commission (KPU).

The SMRC is among the 39 independent institutions registered with the KPU to publish quick count results.

KPU Chairman Husni Kamil Manik, however, reminded that quick count results were not the same as the KPU'€™s official results.

'€œEveryone is still required to oversee the process [of recapitulation] until May 9,'€ he said in Jakarta on Thursday, as quoted by Antara news agency.

The final results will officially be announced by the KPU on May 9. (tjs)

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