This year Ukrainian fund “Democratic Initiatives” (FDI), which traditionally organized exit polls for the Ukrainian elections, has opened the pages in five popular social networks. This will allow Internet users to instantly see the results of exit poll. In the fund they decided it is better than to tell about them on television or write in newspapers.
Exit poll is express a sociological survey of voters leaving polling stations. Exit poll was invented in the United States in order to help news and television organizations. The authors of the survey probably did not even think that in Ukraine exit polls will soon become one of the most important instruments of social control for fairness and transparency of elections.
“We fight for that exit poll is the Ukrainian tradition” – the director of the FDI Ilko Kuchera said.
It should be not only the tradition, but also a kind of new Ukrainian brand. It should be a positive example for all of the countries which have chosen the path of democratic reforms.
This tradition of exit polls was started by FDI. They arranged first exit poll and TV show “Election Night” during the parliamentary elections of 1998. Since then, the project participants have gained considerable experience in organizing and carrying out surveys on exit polling.
The real test for Ukrainian democracy and sociologists became the presidential election in 2004. Since then, the exit polls in Ukraine were seen as a unique opportunity to confront falsifications of the election process, which was a fairly new phenomenon in the world.
Survey data in 2006 differed from official results not more than 1.1%. This gave the reason to believe that during the 2006 parliamentary elections there was no massive fraud that could significantly change the voting results.
In 2007, when early elections to the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine hapened, the ninth exit poll identified not only the winners of the election race, but quite accurately presented the votes for different parties. Immediately after the publication of exit poll, politicians started to talk about the results of the elections without even waiting for the official results.
One of the peculiarities of the national exit poll of 2010 will be the use of “new media”, including direct broadcasts on YouTube. In addition, this information will be simultaneously published on Ukrainian and English sites:
and distributed by e-mail and social networks.
This year there was the first nationwide survey which was conducted almost exclusively at the expense of Ukrainians. Public Service asked Ukrainians to make donations to conduct this exit poll. They also started to collect money through the Internet. This kind of an experiment will show how Ukrainans are prepared to support Ukrainian civic initiatives.
Social Media in Ukraine 