The Mindanao votes for party list

The question of “statistical improbability” is an important one because the administration has been pushing the line that the SWS surveys during the campaign period were indicating a win for GMA “anyway” and that any cheating that might be proved in Mindanao cannot alter the results anyway. Just this evening Gabby Claudio was talking to Ces Drilon and against trotted out this line of argumentation.

I do know of one instance that even professional statisticians at SWS cannot deny was a case of real “statistical improbability” bordering on the “impossible”. It has to do with the SWS NCR exit poll result. In that instance, I remember SWS’s Mahar Mangahas and Mercy Abad come on television late at night after the election was over to announce that GMA had won the NCR region. That announcement became the headlines the very next day (literally within hours) on such foreign outlets as the International Herald Tribune, the Washington Post and others. “GMA Wins Election in Metro Manila” Now we all know that FPJ won by a veritable landslide all over Luzon, and most especially NCR. This really puzzled me later because exit polls are known to be very accurate, and so I charted by Region what their exit polling results were, and found that in all regions except NCR, SWS had correctly determined the outcomes within about plus or minus 5%. I still have the plot, and every trained mathematician I showed it too saw what I saw:: a statistically incredible result for Metro Manila. You see, the little understood business of the “margin of error” is really a quality control check on any polling process. Though any result can come out of any particular poll (including that GMA seemed to have won in NCR on that day), there is a also a very rigorous “probability” that such a result would actually be seen. In this case, by my computation, that probability was one in about eighteen trillion! if we assume the exit poll had been done scientifically. And of course Mahar and Mercy knew that when they were announcing this completely unbelievable result. For one thing it went against the trend of all their previous polling in NCR (where, unlike the nationwide tallies, FPJ led consistently all throughout the campaign period). For another, they KNOW statistics and would know what I am referring to here. They should not have announced a result that they KNEW was not a “FLUKE”, which was how Mercy ABad in in several interviews with (largely innumerate) media people afterwards kept insinuating it was. Well baloney! Someone dickered with their data (maybe them, maybe not) but no one who passed Stat 101 can possibly accept that “Oh it was just a fluke”. The only explanation I can offer at this point is that GMA/K4 knew they would lose big in that exit poll and in the eventual NCR result, and could not afford for the first big headline in the international arena after the elections to be :”FPJ wins by landslide in Philippine Capital” because that would have spoiled the whole subsequent scenario of wholesale cheating at the COC/SOV level.

As for the rest of the survey results, I generally believed the SWS surveys, being a mathematics hawk in reviewing them. But the line of argumentation that GMA would have won anyway is not borne out even if one accepts that every single survey (except) NCR was done scientifically (without polluted data). Why? Because the margin of error was large enough that actually, either candidate had a statistically even chance of winning the race.

What this proves to me, with near mathematical certainty, is that even SWS can be made part of a vast cheating conspiracy, whose outlines we only dimly perceive in these conversations between GMA and Garcillano. I just wish every frigging reporter would be required to go and take some classes in the statistics of surveys.

I don’t consider Mahar Mangahas or Mercy Abad professional statisticians anymore, because it was their duty to the profession to NOT report that NCR exit poll result, to recheck the data and question how the exit poll could have controverted the trend so firmly established in their previous results. Not just by a small blip anyway, but with a different winner! Just simply incredible. This anomaly was surely obvious to them at the time they made their results known for the world to believe. It was a million times more probable that an asteroid would hit SWS hq on that night. I wish one had. They traded the SWS good reputation built up over many many years for what? Can I even be charitable and assume they were just “used” and they didn’t know it? NO! Not if you believe mathematics and statistics and understand the meaning of “margin of error” as I know that they both do.

The numbers I refer to are all on the public record. I think every math and stat class in the country should dig them up and teach the future generations a great lesson in Numeracy For Democracy and how the SWS stands for “Such a Waste of Science!”

I agree with Swerty that the surveys are used by all sides for propaganda purposes. But this was a case where the SWS itself, its founder and its main data collector, cannot hide behind the usually defensible assertion that “hey this is the result we got, we’ve checked it out and believe everything was done right” For this was a case that should have caused Mahar and Mercy to say to themselves immediately, “hey wait a minute, the chance of that result arising is one in 18 trillion. we better check it and not blithely announce it to the world right away.”

Everyone in this country does propaganda, but when they pollute and corrupt mathematics, ginagago na tayo ng mga ketong sa kapal na mukha nila! Eh hindi naman lahat ganoon katanga.

Let me put this another way. The chances of the NCR exit poll coming out the way it did on election day is about the same as Bata Reyes on his best day at pool missing all the balls at break 72,580 times in a row.

They knew it then and they know it now! Pweh!

ric1,

I see the logic in what you’re saying. But it’s sad to realize that a supposedly professional service institution like them would have money as its prime motivator.

opti

Don’t any of you get it? COMELEC sells party-list votes and congressional seats, and if all the tapes are to be believed, even the presidency and senatorial positions are FOR SALE. We’ve always known this, but to have the proof IN YOUR FACE must make us realize something.. and how can we just tolerate it? but that seems to be what we are doing. Implications? More alienation of voters, more manipulation of the votes, more immigration, more of the same sickening system..

Duh! do you know many zeros are there in a trillion?

If you toss a coin, what the probability that its going to lands on its tail? 0.5 diba?

In the last elections, what was the probability that Eddie Gil was going to win? 0.2 diba? Of course you do a survey to refine that…probably reducing his value to 0.0002.

Now, whats the probability than GMA won in Manila? 0.0000000000018? Hello? At the very least – in my calculation its 0.49.

Was in a conversation the other day with a senior foreign correspondent who’s been covering Philippine affairs since the early 80’s. Noted to him that since way back, the ARMM region of Mindanao (even before it became an autonomous ek), along with certain other warlord-dominated regions or provinces had long been considered as ‘containers’ of “command votes”.

It is has long been a pattern that when national vote tallies take place that, even with the advent of the so-called high-tech communications and computer-aided vote counts, the results from political-warlord controlled areas were inexplicably delayed.

To my mind, this is obviously because this is where electoral fraud “operators” harvest votes to overhaul the deficits of their clients.

Even NAMFREL admits that in Lanao Sur for example, historically they have only gotten only about 50-percent of the Election Returns (ERs), while in other parts of the country upwards of 90 to even 100-percent of the ERs are gathered.

How can we ever hope to have elections which truly refle4ct the people’s will when such “command votes” remain for sale?

To Jay : The lessons of the ‘PAST’ shows us the mistakes of the ‘PRESENT’ so that we will not repeat the same mistake again in the ‘FUTURE’