Shlomo Filber, the pollster for the Direct Polls Institute - the company that conducts the polls for Channel 14 - spoke last night (Thursday) on the "Sofshavau" program with Yaakov Bardugo, and explained: How is it possible that there is a huge gap between his polls, compared to polls shown on other media channels?
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Filber: "For five years, there were gaps of two or three seats between me and the others. I usually raised the right by two or three seats, and in the end it was right. More or less with the start of the reform and the protest, we suddenly saw a drop of ten seats in the polls among all the pollsters.".
According to Filber, the right-wing government was elected with 64 seats, but immediately after the elections, polls began to appear with ten seats fewer for the bloc. At first I thought it was some kind of one-off, but since then we've seen that all the polls, all the others, are based on these numbers.".
Filber admitted during the interview that the gap bothered him, so he began to investigate the source of the gap.
""At first I thought that maybe some of the Likudniks weren't participating in the panels, because we really saw them leaving them. But in the end, as they say, the coin was under the lamp.".
He said the other pollsters decided to "change the samples.".
He clarified: "There are about 10 million citizens in Israel, but about a million of them do not have the right to vote. According to the Central Bureau of Statistics, 77% of the country's citizens are Jews, 21% are minorities or foreigners.".
In the Knesset elections, there is a difference between the entire population of the State of Israel and those who are eligible to vote for the Knesset, and therefore, explains Filber, the sample has no significance for the political opinion of the population segment in question. The million residents in question include East Jerusalem Arabs, foreign workers, Bedouin residents of the south, Druze in the Golan Heights, and members of the northern faction of the Islamic Movement – most of whom vote for the opposition bloc.
According to Filber, these are the ten mandates that constitute the gap in the various polls: "The pollsters are essentially artificially inflating the size of the opposition bloc and causing the coalition bloc to shrink," he said.
As an example, Filber presents the nature of the Arab population's sampling: "Over the past few years, we have seen that between 10 and 12 Arab Knesset members are elected to the Knesset, which is between 8 and 11 percent. This means that essentially the rest of the Knesset members, the other 90 percent, are Jews.
""Almost all the polls in the samples build their sample according to 80% Jews, 20% Arabs," continued Filber, "If it really were 20% Arabs who have the right to vote - we should have seen 18 Arab seats. We don't see that. We still see 10 seats, but in the samples it causes the right-wing bloc, which is larger among the Jewish population, to shrink.".
According to Filber, this incident began a year and a half ago, after the protest tried to claim that the government lacked legitimacy, and aimed for as many votes as possible against it. "Overall, you actually get a number of real voters who can get to the polls that are hundreds of thousands of voters," Filber concluded - explaining that when you count the opinions of those who don't have the right to vote, you actually reduce the power of those who do.
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