The US data and polling company “Edison Research” (Edison Research) said today that differences between an exit poll it conducted for Georgia's parliamentary election on Saturday and the official vote results "cannot be explained by normal deviations alone and suggest manipulation of the vote at the local level," Reuters, BTA reported.
The Central Election Commission of Georgia announced that the ruling party “Georgian Dream“ win the election with 54% of the vote. A result that opposition parties and the country's president said was a fraud.
Edison's exit poll, commissioned by the opposition television channel Formula, showed that the four main opposition parties in Georgia are on track to achieve a majority.
Global market research and data company "Harris Ex" (HarrisX), which conducted an exit poll for the parliamentary elections in Georgia, said yesterday that the official results announced by the election commission were "statistically impossible". Shortly after, the Georgian opposition called a new protest on Monday, Reuters reported.
The Georgian Central Election Commission (CEC) announced that the ruling party "Georgian Dream" won the election with 53.96% of the vote. The opposition and Georgian President Salome Zurabishvili described the results as fake, and the prosecutor's office launched an investigation. Three Georgian opposition parties have called for street protests, saying the election was rigged. The analysis of "Harris Ex" shows discrepancies between the results announced by the CEC that cannot be explained from a statistical point of view, indicating possible voting irregularities.
"Our exit poll analysis, compared to the CEC's final information, raises questions about the final vote count published by the Central Election Commission of the Republic of Georgia," said "Harris Ex". "We see statistically unexplained discrepancies amounting to more than 8% of the total vote, or at least 172,523 votes, in at least 27 precincts." According to the company, the discrepancy "cannot be explained by statistical variance, pointing to possible voting irregularities".