Peter Espeut

The Battle of the pollsters is now on in earnest! The Bill Johnson poll has the PNP seven percentage points ahead, the Mark Wignall poll has the JLP seven percentage points ahead, and the Don Anderson poll has a statistical dead heat. And we haven't even heard from the Stone poll team yet!

And everybody has a different sample size, and everybody claims a sample error of plus or minus three percentage points. I would like to see those calculations. Which of these polls is going to claim that they practice scientific (random) sampling which would allow sample error to be calculated?

Sampling methods

I remember in the 1980s listening to Prof. Carl Stone at the UWI explaining his sampling method: He identified which polling divisions (PDs) swungduring general elections, and then he only did polling in those swing PDs; and so he was always able to predict who was going to win a Jamaican general election.

As effective as his methods were, they did not follow the rules of scientific sampling, and I have never been able to figure out how he was then able to claim any particular range of sample error.

I think it is time that we begin to seriously examine the sampling methodology of our growing number of political pollsters before we put too much confidence in their findings.

The pollsters do not agree on who would win if the general election is called, but there is one point, however, on which they all agree, and that is that about 25 per cent of those registered to vote claim that they will not vote at all. Not that they are undecided who to vote for: that is a different segment of the electorate; 25 per cent of those registered to vote state that they have no intention of exercising their legal franchise.

Who are these people, and why have they chosen to become political dropouts? Is it that they are totally disillusioned by all the choices offered them? Is it that they are completely turned off from Jamaican politics? Is it that they decline to participate in a system where there is a fight for political spoils by hostile tribes perpetually at war? Or is it all of the above?

And the 25 per cent are the ones who chose to get enumerated; the profound political dropouts are those who declined to be enumerated in the first place, who were so appalled at the choices they were being asked to make that they didn't even want their names on the list. Some estimates put this figure as high as one-third of those eligible to be enumerated, which means that if you add the 25 per cent who will not vote, more than 50 per cent of the electorate - a real moral majority - are disenchanted with the quality of democracy in Jamaica. Politics in Jamaica is becoming a game played by fewer and fewer people.

Political system

In our political system,boycotting elections, abstaining from voting, or purposely spoiling one's vote, has no legal meaning. If 50 per cent of the electorate stay away from the polls or spoil their vote, and the winning party takes 20 per cent of the popular vote but wins 80 per cent of the seats, they are still declared victors by a landslide. And the fact that the majority might treat the whole thing as a farce counts for nothing!

The recent Bill Johnson poll showed that the Most Hon. Portia Simpson Miller received huge support when she first became Prime Minister in February 2006; many people believed that she was new and different, and would make changes in favour of the Jamaican poor. A year later she had lost most of her 'bounce', and her lost support went not to the JLP but to those who said they would not vote at all.

The people clearly want a change; but neither party, each with its garrisons and its Dons, is offering it.