Exit Polls Miss the Mark in Seoul and Gyeongnam: Was It the 'Shy Voter' Effect?

[Anchor]

At 6:00 p.m. yesterday (June 3), the three major terrestrial broadcasters announced the results of their joint exit polls for the local elections. However, the predictions for the Seoul mayoral and South Gyeongsang provincial governor races differed significantly from the actual vote counts, leading to incorrect projections of the winners.

Reporter Nam Seungmo examines why these predictions failed.

[Reporter]

For these exit polls, SBS commissioned three polling agencies in collaboration with KBS and MBC.

Out of 16 cities and provinces, the exit polls successfully predicted the winners in 14.

However, in the Seoul mayoral race, contrary to the poll results—which showed 51.4% for the Democratic Party's Jung Won-oh and 46% for the People Power Party's Oh Se-hoon—candidate Oh emerged victorious.

In the South Gyeongsang gubernatorial race, the poll showed 54.3% for the Democratic Party's Kim Kyung-soo and 45.7% for the People Power Party's Park Wan-su, but candidate Park won.

The margin of error was ±1.8%p for Seoul and ±1.7%p for South Gyeongsang. As the actual vote counts fell outside these ranges, the predictions for the winners failed.

The exit polls were conducted by polling agencies Korea Research, Korea Research (KOREA), and Ipsos, which divided the regions and deployed over 3,200 survey personnel to interview approximately 108,000 voters at 615 polling stations.

The failure to predict the outcomes within the margin of error appears to be due to a decline in accuracy for both the on-site exit polls conducted on election day and the surveys regarding early voting.

First, for early voting, telephone surveys were conducted with approximately 32,000 people. However, opposition party supporters, often referred to as "shy conservatives," did not actively participate in the surveys, and there were also numerous cases of voters refusing to respond to exit polls at the polling stations on election day.

[Kim Chun-seok / Division Director at Korea Research: While ruling party supporters tend to participate more actively in surveys and voting, opposition supporters are more passive, often due to concerns such as election fraud. Consequently, we are facing difficulties in ensuring the representativeness of the survey respondents and voters.]

Furthermore, exit polls are typically adjusted and supplemented using results from previous exit polls. Analysts suggest that because the preceding exit polls themselves failed to properly reflect the sentiments of conservative voters, there were inherent limitations in the adjustment process.

(Video reporting: Lee Byung-ju | Video editing: Jeon Min-gyu)
※ Please note: This article was translated by AI and may contain errors.