An exit poll by Bir Zeit University in Ramallah showed Fatah winning 63 seats in the 132-member parliament with 46.4 percent of the vote and Hamas taking 58 seats with 39.5 percent.
I would be really cautious with exit polls in an electoral system like this–even if it were a ‘normal’ environment in which people felt free to talk to people on the street asking them how they just voted. By that I mean that this electoral system–multi-seat plurality, plus list PR in parallel–means the pollster needs to know:
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(1) whether the voter used all his/her votes in the nominal tier (the local multi-seat district);
(2) the identities of all the candidates he or she voted for;
(3) and the party list the voter checked.
That’s a lot of moving parts for each interviewee. And then the exit-polling company has to extrapolate from a sample and somehow generate a national allocation. That involves lots of assumptions about how completely other similar voters filled out their slate of candidates in the nominal tier. In general, multi-seat plurality races are very hard to predict because small vote shifts for individual candidates can make substantial differences in the outcome of the election in a district. It is not as though the outcome can be extrapolated just from knowing the party a voter preferred when the voter has more than one vote and can use all or none of them and spread them out on candidates of multiple parties or concentrate them all on one party.
Wow, if the exit pollsters get it right other than by just luck, I will be really impressed!
OK, so let’s assume I will be impressed–really impressed–and the projection is about right (for all I know it might be). Then the advantage ratio for the second largest party (Hamas) exceeds that of the largest party (Fatah). The advantage ratio tells us how over-/under-represented a given party is, and is calculated as %seat/%votes.
For Fatah, 47.8% of the seats on 46.4% of the votes would mean an advantage ratio of 1.03. For Hamas 43.9% of the seats on 39.5% of the votes would be 1.11.
On December 28, after surveying the electoral system, I said that this is the sort of electoral system that would manufacture a majority for a party of around 45% if that party’s voters tended to vote the full slate in the multi-seat districts. However, given divisions in Fatah, I doubted that would happen. Referring to the factions in Fatah that re-united only after the deadline for registering candidates was extended, I noted:
Again, I think we need to be cautious about projections from these exit polls. But if the results are relatively close to the projection, it would show this very unusual electoral system working pretty much as expected, given the different levels of unity of the two largest parties.
Many more details, of course, at The Head Heeb, where Jonathan expects the final seat tally for Hamas to be closer to that of Fatah than is the case in the projection. If he is correct, and if the votes projection is fairly accurate, then the final result would be an even greater advantage to the more unified Hamas in votes-to-seats conversion. (And I would expect the final votes to vary less from the exit-poll projection than the final seats would, because I assume the votes being projected are the party-list votes. These, being a single choice for each voter and pooled nationwide, are not subject to the difficulties mentioned above for the nominal tier, aside from normal sampling error and potential interviewing bias.)
Also see Political Artithmetik for district-level comparisons of the turnout in this election and last year’s presidential election.
Caution on Palestinian Exit Polls
Matthew Shugart explains why we should take Palestinian exit polls with a grain of salt.
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Scion grafted by PoliBlog: A Rough Draft of my Thoughts — 25 January 2006 @ 18:58
My gut feeling says Hamas will not win as many seats as it has been projected by exit polls. It is likely that the Palestinian people, although discontent with Fatah efforts over the last decade, will not vote for a group that is likely to bring them into a direct conflict with Israel.
Recently, Israel has pulled out of Gaza and is planning further pull-out with the purpose of creating a permanent border. Once they have a border, Israel will have all the right, as a sovereign nation, to engage in a large scale military action against Palestine (now an official, recognized State) – if provoked by groups like Hamas, Fatah, Islamic Jihad, etc…
Seed planted by Daniel — 25 January 2006 @ 20:07
[...] The same week as the Canadian election, Palestinians shocked the world by electing a Hamas parliamentary majority. Polls–both pre-election and exit–were wrong. Hamas won less than 45% of the vote, yet will control nearly three fifths of the seats due to an extremely disproportional electoral system. The Palestinian election showed how the unusual electoral rules of multiple nontransferable vote can yield sweeps of multi-seat districts by one party that has party-loyal voters just as much as the same rules can yield excessive fragmentation when voters are not party-loyal, as the Liberian election in October had shown. [...]
Scion grafted by Fruits and Votes » Blog Archive » Half a year of Fruits and Votes: A remarkable series of elections — 11 February 2006 @ 17:32