LEAKS RESULTS BELGIUM. New leaks and estimates of the results are expected before 8 p.m. this Sunday, June 19 for the 2nd round of the 2022 legislative elections, in particular from La Libre Belgique which had already risked it during the first round…
Look for a legislative result near you
[Mis à jour le 19 juin 2022 à 19h34] First leaks from legislative results appeared on Belgian media this Sunday, June 19, 2022, a few minutes before the official time of publication of the first results at 8 p.m. But surprise, it was not La Libre Belgique which drew first but another Belgian media, Le Soir, which prides itself on initial estimates. La Libre Belgique had however announced at midday on its website, in the heart of an article dedicated to these French elections, the publication of results before the hour. So the question was no longer whether someone would leak estimates, but who would draw first. La Libre Belgique immediately took action, but was blown away by politeness!
If the practice is less visible during the elections for the Assembly than during the last presidential election, data was delivered last Sunday – albeit late – to “spoil” the result of the first round and the virtual equality of LREM and Nupes around 25%. “As during the presidential election, the French media are prohibited from broadcasting any information relating to the results of these legislative elections before 8 p.m. This is not the case in Belgium, where LaLibre.be will provide you with the estimates and the first first results, from this afternoon”, explained the Belgian media on its website.
In the first round of the legislative elections, it was already the Libre Belgique which had unveiled the first estimates shortly after 7 p.m., trends close to what the final result of the ballot will reveal a few minutes later. In the first round of the legislative elections, it was already the Libre Belgique which had unveiled the first estimates shortly after 7 p.m., trends close to what the final result of the ballot will reveal a few minutes later.
Impossible in the French media… But not in Belgium!
Throughout the day, La Libre Belgique had therefore preserved the suspense and in its wake the RTBF, French-speaking Belgian radio-television, the newspaper Le Soir or even the Swiss newspapers Le Temps and the Tribune de Genève which had already participated in the past great unpacking of the elections before 8 p.m. This relative discretion also contrasted with the avalanche of “polls” and other “estimates” that “La Libre” had provided during the 2022 presidential election, sometimes from mid-afternoon, a practice, let us remember, impossible in the French media.
As a reminder, unlike Belgian and Swiss media such as Libre Belgique, RTBF, Le Soir or La Tribune de Genève, the audiovisual media in France are subject by French law to a reserve period, which begins on the Friday at midnight preceding voting and ends on Sunday at 8 p.m. During this period, they are prohibited from broadcasting any new poll or making the slightest comment of a political nature, under penalty of sanctions and a fine of 75,000 euros. A rule supposed to guarantee the serenity of the ballot by avoiding giving any information that could influence the vote of voters who have not yet decided. But a rule that very often puts the press at odds.
Essential estimates before 8 p.m.
The publication of the results by the Belgian media such as Libre Belgique illustrates in any case the major stake which is played out in secret in the media, every 5 years, on polling days. To be able to reveal reliable results from 8 p.m. and the end of the legal framework, all or almost all the press groups are provided with figures to be ready on time. If the French polling institutes claim most of the time not to be at the origin, many figures and estimates nevertheless circulate in the newsrooms and sometimes even in plain sight, on social networks, or on websites. strangers.
The polls commission calls for caution
At the beginning of April, before the presidential election, the National Commission for the Control of the Electoral Campaign had warned the French to be cautious about the results of the presidential election revealed by the foreign media: “The Polling Commission obtained from the 8 main institutes polls (BVA, Elabe, Harris Interactive, Ifop, Ipsos, Kantar, Odoxa, OpinionWay) the assurance that none of them will carry out exit polls. to such polls can only be the result of rumors or manipulation and therefore no credit should be given to them,” she wrote in a statement.
Leaks are not exit polls
If there is no guarantee that this kind of survey has completely disappeared, polling institutes have gradually abandoned the method known as “exit polls” from the polls since the beginning of the 2000s. And this for two reasons. First, the authorities, starting with the Survey Commission, asked for a firm commitment on their part not to carry out this kind of survey. “The Polling Commission has obtained from the 8 main polling institutes (BVA, Elabe, Harris Interactive, Ifop, Ipsos, Kantar, Odoxa, OpinionWay,) the assurance that none of them will carry out exit polls “, she wrote in a press release before the first round of the presidential election. Then, the method of exit polls would now be deemed by professionals to be too unreliable to allow a correct estimate of the results on election night.
Among the three methods used by the polling institutes, namely the exit poll, the telephone poll and estimates, only the third is still used. Exit polls are no longer fashionable because of the biases they generate. In fact, their reliability is easily questionable: if a pollster questions you, you can answer something other than your real vote, for fear of judgment from others in particular. A respondent who is surrounded by acquaintances, whether relatives or neighbours, may hide his real opinions because he does not want to reveal them in broad daylight. To protect himself, he will interchange his actual vote with the one he feels is most acceptable and accepted by the people on his side at the time. This problem is thus linked to the declarative nature of this type of survey, and it can end up completely biasing the response when the panels are reduced. For this reason, more and more polling institutes are reluctant to use this method and prefer a count of “real” ballots during the first counting, in several hundred “test” polling stations closing from 6 p.m. or 7 p.m.
Survey, estimate… Clear confusion
Do the Belgian media make the difference between polls and estimates? In an article in Le Monde published on Sunday April 24, i.e. after a series of leaks for the presidential election, Dorian De Meeûs, editor-in-chief of La Libre Belgique, assured that his newspaper was working “in collaboration with different sources, at least four, at different levels, whether with institutes, campaign teams or other French media which share opinion polls and polls with it”. La Libre Belgique thus claimed to know “always the source of the polls, with how many people they were carried out and in what way”. And the changeover is made “from 7 p.m.”, time at which the chief editor claims to have “estimates on the basis of counting”. “We are not inventing anything,” he insists.
Why should you be wary of leaks?
La Libre Belgique was not really mistaken last week when it announced around 7:30 p.m. that “La Nupes, led by Jean-Luc Mélenchon, [était] credited with 25.7 to 25.8% of the vote, Together (the macronie cartel) with 25% and the National Rally (of Marine Le Pen) with 18.5 to 19.3%”, with “behind: The Republicans and allies (from 11.6 to 14%), as well as Reconquest! (3.8 to 4%)”. She then quoted “national projections made [dimanche] by several reputable polling institutes in France”. In addition to the vagueness of such a source, the term “projections”, usually used to refer to the number of seats for each political formation, could be subject to caution. Another term which must immediately arouse your suspicion if it is used this evening for the second round of the legislative elections: the pollsters assure that they do not (or no longer) conduct “exit polls” on election days. Libre Belgique and RTBF, but during the presidential election this time.
Exit polls, based on statements and therefore subject to bias, have been outdated for several years. But the pollsters are still the producers of estimates unveiled by the television channels at 8 p.m., when the leaden screed that weighs on the media all day is finally lifted. Estimates based not on a declarative survey, but on the first ballots counted. The Ifop institute thus explained to LCI during the last campaign that it had 260 representative polling stations among the 70,000 polling stations in France. The latter have been skilfully chosen according to the size of the municipality to which they belong and a consistent geographical distribution between large cities, medium-sized towns and rural areas, all in each department.
From 7 p.m. until 7:45 p.m., data does indeed exist and these are integrated over time into software that will process them algorithmically to extrapolate a national estimate of the result. The method is therefore not based on a poll or an “exit poll” as we still often read… including in the pages of La Libre Belgique.