Poll surveys are nothing but blatant political manipulations
With all due respect, I do not buy this premeditated acts of conditioning the minds of the highly impressionable electorate, and of shamelessly manipulating the trend of political inclinations. To establish a trend represented by extrapolating the figures taken from a few hundreds or even one or two thousand selected sampling is to commit the fallacy of oversimplification. The art or science of political surveys can never be a perfect exercise in decision-making or trend-setting. It is the apex of outrageous presumptuousness to claim a fact from the answers to questions that were intentionally framed to elicit some desired answers. It is nothing but cheap brainwashing.
Surveys from the very start have always been and will always be a big business. They are conducted by a business firm using the shield of a research agency, not really as a scientific pursuit but for profit. Surveys are done upon the requests or subscription of a partisan group that simply wants to test the social climate or have a feel of the political trend. The survey directors may be professionals, of course, in fairness to them, and they might be using some well-established and generally-accepted practices in gathering and interpreting research results. But these firms have been put up for business and they want to make their clients and customers happy.
I am just a lawyer and am not adept at statistical analysis, but it only requires plain common sense to make us realize that the answer of a thousand respondents cannot represent the stand of a hundred million Filipinos. The sampling is too slim considering the size, the complexity and the multiple classes of a hundred million people. Asking one hundred Cebuanos cannot be accepted as sufficient to accurately measure the stand of more than two million Filipinos in Cebu. That is why I cannot accept as a gospel truth the audacity of survey firms which apparently intend to program the minds of the people along the direction of their survey results. Such would constitute a plain political brainwashing.
There must be a law that shall regulate these surveys because this involves national interests. The manner of conducting these surveys as well as the authenticity of the results should be subject to public scrutiny and review by a government agency, perhaps the National Statistics Office. For it is very dangerous if the government allows some private firms and individuals to manipulate the people's political decision-making. Many of our voters, with due respect, do not have that degree of discernment and sophistication as to take survey results with a grain of salt. These surveys can be used by unscrupulous politicians to manipulate trends and thus influence the ultimate results of the national polls.
People often follow the directions where the winds are blowing because of the natural and behavioral phenomenon of bandwagon mentality. People want to be identified with the winning group or the leading candidate. Thus, some manipulative survey groups may intentionally create a trend, and the people would simply follow it. That would make such purveyors of artificial trending as the legendary Pied Piper of Babylon. They voice out the clarion call, and the people respond to the stimulus and follow the crowd. I do not know if I am just a congenital non-conformist. But I totally reject these blatant acts of interfering with my free will and independent judgment.
Perhaps, it is time for our electorate to grow in maturity and refuse to be led into temptations by false prophets. We should reject any attempt to program our will and intellect. We need to individually scrutinize the candidates based on competence and character, and not because he or she is leading in the surveys. We should never be swayed by survey trends. Even Christ Himself lost to Barrabas in the random and extemporaneous survey that Pilate conducted. Pilate did not know that the scribes and Pharisees manipulated the surveys and brainwashed the crowds to vote for Barrabas. And so, today, we should be careful with the modern manipulators of the human mind. We can do no less.
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