ISLAMABAD, Pakistan (APP)—The credibility of two American polling organizations is under question after a television team looking into Pakistan poll results released in Washington this week discovered that two American pollsters failed to disclose their shared political connections to the Republican party and that they might have even released poll results under two different names in order to boost impact.
The incident is fueling a debate in Pakistan about the extent of U.S. interest in domestic Pakistani politics and in the possible result of the Pakistani parliamentary elections on Feb. 18.
Two U.S. polling organizations, the International Republican Institute (IRI) and the relatively unknown TerrorFreeTomorrow.org, raised questions when they both released their polls on the same day—Feb. 11. The two also appear to have jointly conducted the poll in Pakistan without explicitly mentioning this fact. Both of them gave the same dates in which they conducted the polls: between 19 and 29 January.
There is no explanation how two independent, nonprofit organizations conducted two different polls during the same period interviewing two different sets of people and then released the results on the same day, exactly one week to the Pakistani elections, without possible prior coordination.
Producers of a television show at PTV Network also discovered during their research into the story that important Republicans were sitting on the boards of both organizations.
“We found out that Senator John McCain is the president of one of them, the IRI, and a member of the board at the second one, the TerrorFreeTomorrow.org,” said a producer at the weekly PTV talk show, Worldview From Islamabad.
Sen. McCain, From Arizona, is a leading Republican presidential candidate and is considered to be close to the Bush administration.
Names of other prominent Republicans are found in the list of the board of directors at both organizations, including some who have worked closely with Washington’s anti-terrorism policy. The IRI is partially funded by the Republican Party, but TerrorFreeTomorrow.org does not disclose on its website the source of its funding.
Ken Ballen, the president of TerrorFreeTomorrow.org, refused to give an interview to the Pakistani television show on his poll’s allaged credibility issues. “Mr. Ballen,” says the host Ahmed Quraishi, “agreed to the interview but then refused to take calls. He later sent an email to PTV saying he doesn’t have time for an interview, not today, not one week form now.”
The host suspects Ballen refused to give an interview in order to avoid answering the questions raised about the credibility of the two U.S. polls.
The biggest dent to the credibility of the two polls lay in the numbers.
Republican Party’s IRI said it polled 3,845 Pakistanis, which comes down to a mere 0.00072 percent of an estimated 160 million Pakistanis. The other U.S. pollster, headed by Ballen, said it polled 1,157, which comes to just 0.0024 percent of all Pakistanis.
“It is preposterous,” says Quraishi, “that they made sweeping assumptions about the choices of the Pakistani voters based on these figures and using dishonest means to create impact. Why are they so eager to influence our elections?”
This report was released by the APP, Pakistan’s official news agency
http://www.ahmedquraishi.com/article_detail.php?id=207
..I guess the polls which were released and hotly discussed in this forum aren’t as innocent as some people thought.
Vote PML -Q