TVP1, TVN24 and Polsat News television stations commissioned Ipsos to carry out exit poll and late poll surveys during the European Parliament election in Poland, on 26th May 2019. Orange and Digital Virgo were responsible for providing the technical support for the Ipsos survey. Ipsos together with its steady business partners is an established provider of exit poll service on the Polish market.
Exit poll is a special survey carried out during election in which voters leaving polling stations answer the question of who they had voted for, whereas late poll consists in sending partial election results in a given electoral commission. Based on special algorithms Ipsos carries out an analysis of the collected data and prepares an election results forecast before the final results are announced by the National Electoral Commission.
Ipsos conducted the survey in front of 845 randomly selected polling stations which guarantees a representative sample of voters. Ipsos pollsters asked the respondent who had just voted to fill in a short survey with questions which a list of candidates they had voted for and with some additional questions regarding participation in previous elections. Additionally, some basic demographic data regarding the respondent was collected (e.g. sex, age, occupation, education).
Subsequently, the Ipsos pollsters sent the surveys in the form of automatically generated SMS messages to a short number serviced by Digital Virgo using an STK (SIM Tool Kit) application which was prepared and uploaded into special SIM cards by Orange. Digital Virgo conducted preliminary processing of the data supplied by the pollsters, aggregated it and then delivered it to the Ipsos research center. The key element in this process was providing high accessibility of Digital Virgo platform so that all operations could take place swiftly, efficiently and without any technical problems.
Ipsos analyzed the data so that, in the evening as soon as the election silence had finished, it could provide television stations with forecast election results which were presented in special election programs. The provided data included information regarding percentage support for electoral committees and the voter turnout. During the election almost 85 000 questionnaires were collected which were steadily flowing to the Ipsos center.
The exit poll survey conducted by Ipsos during the European Parliament election once again proved the expertise of Ipsos in providing accurate forecasts of the final results and the technical solutions of Ipsos, Orange and Digital Virgo worked flawlessly as always.
