The 2004 Presidential Election TVBS Exit Poll

I was arguing about the recent assassination attempt just prior to the municipal elections this year on Forumosa.com, when I stumbled across this statistical paper on the exit poll conducted by TVBS after the 2004 election in which Chen Shui-bian was shot by a disgruntled KMT supporter the day before the election. This exit poll was the first ever for an election in Taiwan. ADDED: One of the authors is a TVBS poll center employee.

According to this paper, the poll was conducted from 8:00 am to 3:00 pm on the day of the election. More than 13,000 individuals were interviewed by trained poll-takers using a paper and pencil questionnaire. The paper describes:

The poll center of TVBS collected the exit poll data and sent them to Mitofsky International by Internet at 3:38. Mitofsky International processed the data analysis and sent the result back to TVBS at 3:55, which predicted the support rates of President Chen Shui-bian (Democratic Progressive Party, DPP) and his opposition Kuomintang (KMT) challenger Lien Chan were 47% vs.53%. Since precincts in some regions, such as Taizhong, Kaohsiung, were not closed until 5:00pm, TVBS decided to delay the projection. Until 5:12pm, they projected that the supporting rates of two candidates were 47% v.s.53%. However, since the margin of difference was less than 8%, according to the principle of the projection of exit polls, they did not declare who was the winner.

Then TVBS sent the quick counts (real voting results) of those precincts which were sampled in the exit polls to Mitofsky International, until 5:20pm the real results of 80 precincts had been sent to U.S. At 5:36pm, based on these 80 precincts’ real counts, Mitofsky International revised the prediction as 50% vs. 50%. At 6:01 pm, they received the data from real counts of all 150 precincts sampled and confirmed the revised support rates (50% vs. 50%).

Note that a couple of hours before the poll counting had finished, based on returns from 80 and then 150 precincts, Mitofsky International already called the election at 50%-50% though the TVBS poll had Lien-Soong ahead 53-47. The paper notes that revisions to exit polls are common for large geographical areas. In sum, what this paper shows is that contrary to some of the propaganda floating around, the TVBS exit poll, once revised with a few early returns, showed the KMT and the DPP in a statistical dead heat.

What were the problems with this poll? They are a legion. The sampling error was rather larger than in American surveys. Non-sampling errors are more important; they show a statistically detectable bias in the poll against the DPP, which accounts for its skew toward the KMT. This is probably not the result of TVBS' innate bias against the DPP but is the result of several issues outlined in the paper. For example, there is the problem of incentives for participation in the poll. Read closely:

In 2004 Taiwan presidential election exit poll, they boldly employed incentives with intent to increase the response rate. They used magnets with logo of TVBS, the sponsor of the survey, as incentives (worth about $3 each). From the aspect of advertisement of the company, it was a good way to enhance the company’s image. TVBS has a relatively neutral image among media in Taiwan, which helps it get trust from the voters.

Not only were they handing out TVBS paraphenalia, but the poll-takers at the individual precincts were all wearing caps with "TVBS" emblazoned on them. Imagine how a DPP voter might react to being accosted by representatives of a rabidly pro-KMT TV news station for polling information. (ADDED: TVBS did not become openly pro-KMT until after this time). Further, the Chen Administration had sent down word that its voters were not to participate in the poll.

In addition to these obvious dampeners to participation by DPP voters, the exit pollsters were forced to stand 30 meters from the polling places. It is known that in exit polls error increases significantly when distance exceeds 25 feet/8 meters. The paper does not define "polling place" but given that polls are conducted in schools and community centers where the voting booths are deep inside the building, it is likely that in practice distances were even greater than the 30 meters suggested here. For example, I stopped by the polling station in my neighborhood during the election, and non-voters were being kept outside the school, roughly 50 meters from where voting was taking place.

That last issue may explain why there are no exit polls for Taiwan elections, because under the current rules that govern access to polling stations on election days, pollsters cannot get close enough to make them reliable.

UPDATE: Mitofsky himself noted in a piece on exit polls that the student poll-takers were not well-trained:

Regrettably, bad sampling and no estimation are the rule and not the exception in emerging nations. It seems to be common practice to tabulate the results in SPSS with little or no weighting. There are other types of missteps, too. Interviewer selection and training in recent exit polls in Venezuela and Taiwan led to biased results. Recent partisan exit polls in Azerbaijan and Mexico led to deliberately distorted results.

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Those Choosy Voters in Our Maturing Democracy

Taiwan Journal hosts a commentary by David Lorenzo of Virginia Wesleyan on how the election confirms Taiwan's maturing democracy. This article describes what has become the new, and very widespread CW:

Taiwan's recent presidential election did more than just determine the future of its executive branch and signal future directions in policy with China. It also underlined the growth and maturation of Taiwan's democracy and revealed important aspects of Taiwan's democratic conception.

Why are we so mature? Lorenzo follows the CW in saying that it shows that Taiwanese are willing to throw leaders out when things go wrong:

This formula appears to be the concept of democracy people on Taiwan embrace: democracy is the election of leaders who make policy decisions. Leaders are then held accountable for their policies and re-elected if successful and voted out of office if they fail.

Bracketing discussion of the Presidential level, let's look at the legislature. Are people willing to toss out the leaders? Clearly not -- the KMT and its allied parties have controlled the legislature after each and every election since the KMT set up its government-in-exile here in 1949. At the local level, the town councils are overwhelmingly KMT, and the township and village chiefs, and the neighborhood and precinct captains, are also overwhelmingly KMT. At those separate levels, it has basically been that way since the KMT set up its government in exile here. Are the people willing to "throw the bastards out?" Nope. Lorenzo's claim that Taiwanese hold politicians accountable for their policies is unsupportable -- the KMT and its allies have been a disaster for the last eight years in the legislature, but they were voted in by a comfortable margin in the most recent election.

The apparent exceptions to the unwillingness of the people to remove one party when it is a failure were the two presidential elections of 2000 and 2004, and the county chief elections, where DPP and KMT politicians have traded places several times in several counties.

Looking at the level of presidential elections, was the public really willing to "throw the bastards out?" In 2000 over 60% of the populace voted Blue -- Chen got elected by a minority. The 2004 election represents the only major election in which Greens outpolled Blues -- and if the KMT had run Ma in '04, they probably would have won then too. So stupid was the choice of Lien Chan that I have a good friend who argues the KMT lost the election on purpose so that it could complete a thorough discrediting and crushing of the DPP.

In other words, if you step past the rhetoric and look at history, there is little or no support for the CW claim that the public judges on policies and is willing to toss politicians out when they don't perform on policy....

The opposite of this is also true: successful policy implementation should result in increased prospects for electoral success, but that is not the case here in Taiwan. Consider -- after Chen Shui-bian cleaned up Taipei and made it into the city it is today, he was immediately tossed out for an unproven KMT politician with no experience of local government. Similarly the DPP's Chen Chu won Kaohsiung by a razor thin margin in the last election even though the previous DPP mayor, Frank Hsieh, had done a fantastic job.

And do you agree with this statement below? With Ma soon to be in power?

A maturing democracy does not entail the perfection of the political system, but this election demonstrates that Taiwan's democratic system has a secure and bright future.

I sure hope so....

[Taiwan]

Bullets and Elections in Taiwan

The popular China blog ESWN, discussing the recent bullets flying in Taiwan, observes....

(TVBS) In Taichung's District #3, DPP legislature candidate Hsieh Hsin-ni lost her primary election but she has filed an appeal on the grounds that one of the polling research companies had an improper business relationship with her opponent and this company gave her really bad numbers that resulted in her losing by 0.28%.

Yesterday, the office of Hsieh-Hsin-ni received a threatening letter which contained a bullet. The letter told her not to support DPP presidential candidate Frank Hsieh anymore.

Hsieh Hsin-ni had appealed to the Appeals Committee of five persons, of which three agreed that there was a procedure flaw in the selection of the polling research companies. But there was also no evidence of wrongdoing by that research company. The matter has been referred to higher levels. If the polls should have to be taken over again, then Hsieh Hsin-ni's current public campaign against the nefarious collusion between her opponent and the polling company will in fact be an unfair factor in the public's mind. That is to day, a poll taking back then and a poll next week will differ to the extent that the public has been exposed to blanket coverage of the public brawl. Oh, yes, it is also well-known that bullets can affect election outcomes in Taiwan.

That last sentence appears to refer to the assassination attempt on Chen Shui-bian by a disgruntled Blue supporter the day before the 2004 Presidential election. It's an article of faith among the pro-Blue crowd that Chen arranged to have himself shot, or dickered the surgery, or something, but anyway, it was all a conspiracy, and of course, it swung the election over to Chen. This theory is on par with alien abduction claims and spoon-bending and other claims of faith that fly in the face of reality -- those same people who constantly claim that Chen and the DPP are hopeless incompetents nevertheless argue that they pulled off a conspiracy involving a cast of thousands at several different locations. The one good thing about, however, is that it makes it easy to sort out who is pro-Blue: pretty much anyone who pushes this theory.

Reality is a bit different than the pro-Blue fantasies alluded to by ESWN, however. It is an article of faith among the Blues that the assassination swung Chen over the edge, giving him the election, but no evidence exists to support this claim. In fact, Agence France Press (AFP) reported on March 7, 2004, that the pro-Blue China Times had come out with a poll showing that the election was close and that Chen had a slight lead over Lien Chan on March 6, 40-38. DPP internal polls were also showing a very tight election with Lien Chan trailing Chen Shui-bian as well by this time. Two days later the pro-Green Taiwan Thinktank came out with a poll that showed results similar to the pro-Blue polls, putting Chen up 40-39.5. In other words, both sides had the election was tight with Chen leading two weeks prior to the assassination attempt.

Chen won by less than 1% of the vote, a number that would have been greater if invalid ballots had been counted, as they had in previous elections. In early March he was leading by up to 2%. Any way you cut it, there's no support in any numbers for a claim that the assassination gave Chen the victory. Instead, any rational analysis of the 2004 election results would have to start with the incompetence of the Blues, who thought they had the election in the bag, mailed in their campaign, and blew a 20 point lead from the 2000 election - a lead that shrank steadily from December of 2003 on. They also had no counter for the 2-28 rally three weeks prior to the election that brought together people from all over the island, and apparently pushing up Chen's support. The DPP government thoughtfully arranged for the Taipei-Ilan tunnel to open five days before the election, and several other things, such as a last-minute endorsement of Chen by Nobel Laureate Lee Yuan-tse, also fell the DPP's way. Fundamentally, if you start with a 20+% lead, and lose by 1%, then you're the one with a problem.

The full irony of the KMT selecting Lien Chan as its Presidential candidate in 2004 is that in 2000, when the Blue vote was split between Lien Chan (24%) and James Soong (38%), enabling Chen to win with 39% of the vote, Deep Blue conspiracy theorists blamed Lee Teng-hui for promoting the candidacy of Lien Chan as a way to split the Blues. Wikipedia records:

Though more popular and consistently ranked higher in the polls, the outspoken former Taiwan Governor James Soong failed to gain the Kuomintang's nomination. As a result, he announced his candidacy as an independent candidate. The Kuomintang responded by expelling Soong and twenty one of his allies in November 1999. It is a very common belief by KMT supporters that President Lee Teng-hui was secretly supporting Chen Shui-bian, and purposely supported the less popular Lien in order to split the Kuomintang, and this belief was given a great deal of credibility after the 2000 election with Lee defected to the pan-Green coalition. Soong, a mainlander, tried to appeal to the native Taiwanese by nominating pro-independence surgeon Chang Chao-hsiung as his running-mate.

In other words, the KMT conspiracy position on the 2000 election recognizes, explicitly, that Lien Chan was too unpopular to win. Yet in 2004 that very same KMT went ahead and nominated that very same Lien Chan themselves!

It is clear that the function of the Chen Asassination conspiracy claim is twofold: it exists to attack Chen Shui-bian, and to more importantly, to divert attention from the incompetence and venality of the Blues.

On a lighter note, in that same post ESWN observes that

Late today, independent legislator Li Ao's office received a threatening letter with a bullet in it. The author claimed to be the leader of a criminal gang and he used foul to language to call Li Ao a coward who is taking money from Frank Hsieh. The writer also said that only Ma Ying-jeou can save taiwan.

Li Ao is a pro-annexation mainlander who ran for President in 2000 on the New Party ticket, the first of the many parties to spin off from the KMT. Li Ao, you may recall, gassed the legislature last year. Li once brandished a knife during a legislative session and told Minister of Defense Lee Jye that he should castrate himself. He has also claimed that the CIA gave him information that Chen arranged his own assassination. Li, who was once a useful public intellectual, has become a clown who told the authorities in Beijing that he hopes they have another 1,000 years of rule....

This is not the first time for Li Ao to make a bullet claim. A couple of years ago he also reported that he recieved a bullet in the mail. Let's hope the police find the culprit, whom I suspect will not be very far from Li Ao's mailbox....

[Taiwan] [Li Ao] [ESWN] [media] [Chen Shui-bian] [KMT]