During the bitterly contested presidential election that took place in the autumn of 2004, Ukrainian popular vocabulary gained a new phrase courtesy of the efforts of the Democratic Initiatives Foundation: "exit poll." An Endowment grantee since 1999, the Foundation assesses developments related to key political, social and economic issues, and collects, analyzes and disseminates public opinion data. Democratic Initiatives conducted a rolling tracking poll prior to the election and an exit poll of voters on the day of each round of the election. Although exit polls have been carried out during other elections in the states of the former Soviet Union, never have they played so significant a role, nor been as widely publicized, as in Ukraine last year.
In Ukraine's election, it was the ready availability of independent exit polling data that provided incontrovertible evidence of fraud and brought hundreds of thousands of people into the streets of Kyiv to demand a fair vote in what has been called Ukraine's "Orange Revolution." Democratic Initiatives' poll, which was carried out in cooperation with Kyiv International Institute of Sociology and the Razumkov Center (also an Endowment grantee), sampled 50,000 voters during the first round of the election and 28,000 during the second round. Experts from independent polling organizations in Russia and Poland provided assistance. The poll was carried out anonymously in 460 electoral districts throughout Ukraine and had a statistical margin of error of approximately two percent. During the second round, when the most electoral violations were observed, the deviation between the official results and the results of the exit poll was a full 11.9 percent for the country as a whole, and as much as 16 percent in certain regions.
Building on experience gained by conducting exit polls in parliamentary and presidential elections since 1998, Democratic Initiatives worked to make its findings widely and rapidly available. The results of the exit poll were available even before the official results from the Central Election Commission were announced, and were widely reported on by independent media outlets and on the internet. The poll results were also extensively covered by Channel 5, the sole national television channel to provide relatively unbiased coverage during the elections. By demonstrating that the official results were clearly not credible, the Democratic Initiatives Foundation gave Ukrainian citizens the opportunity to demand a full accounting of the fraud that had taken place.
|
