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By Maricel V. Cruz, Reporter
The decision of a polling group
to part ways with the Social Weather Stations has put under the
cloud the ability of SWS to credibly poll voter sentiment at ground
level.
Team Unity deputy spokesman
Tonypet Albano made the observation Thursday as he reacted to the
report that TNS Trends Inc., which used to carry out the ground
level work for SWS, has left SWS to work for other survey outfits,
forcing the SWS to do the field work itself and most often in a
half-hazard way.
The giant Lopez-owned ABS-CBN
radio and television network decided to severe its polling
partnership with SWS after the withdrawal of the US-based firm,
Albano said quoting the report.
“Some of the recent findings of
the SWS border on the incredible and the loss of its credible field
work group is probably the reason,” Albano said.
Under fire from polling experts
was a recent SWS survey which essentially said that opposition
candidates are preferred at the local level and the Genuine
Opposition senatorial candidates are the preferred choices of voters
even if they vote for pro-administration candidates at the local
level.
Albano said the opposition
candidates could not be preference of voters for two reasons: most
local contests are between and among candidates of the six parties
in the pro-administration coalition and opposition candidates are
nonexistent in most areas of the country.
“In Central Luzon, for example,
there is no credible candidate for governor allied with the GO in
the seven provinces. How can the SWS say with an iota of truth that
the voters there are inclined to vote for opposition candidates? The
SWS, in the case of Central Luzon, is either lying or making up
scenarios,” Albano said.
Even in the biggest voting
regions in the country, Metro Manila and Southern Tagalog, the
dominant candidates are candidates belonging to the
pro-administration coalition, he said.
Albano advised the SWS to
“cease and desist” from releasing surveys that are totally
incredible so as not to prejudice polling in the country.
“In the end, if the SWS
continues releasing surveys that totally out of sync with the truth
and reality it is the polling profession that will suffer most,”
Albano said.
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