Newspaper Article

Not all elections should be American-style

Eric Bjornlund and Glenn Cowan

2002

Overview

The validity of any exit poll relies absolutely on the willingness of voters to tell a stranger how they voted. In Macedonia, violence, intimidation, and extreme nationalist rhetoric plagued the preelection environment. In the last three weeks before election day, two policemen were murdered, opposition supporters were blocked from entering the capital of Skopje, and party rallies had to be canceled for fear of violence. The interior minister publicly threatened to arrest the leader of the most popular ethnic Albanian party, and many politicians and voters expressed fears about special security forces and paramilitaries. This unfortunate exit poll exercise was unnecessary and detracted from other, more legitimate efforts. A nonpartisan Macedonian election monitoring group, Citizens Organization MOST, conducted its own \"parallel vote tabulation\" based on statistically drawn samples of actual results and reported these findings for all six districts. Their data provide a genuine basis by which to assess the credibility of the official count. Nevertheless, these valid data were initially ignored because an American group provided the first numbers, albeit inaccurate and meaningless ones, to the media.

• Publisher: The Christian Science Publishing Society (d/b/a \"The Christian Science Monitor\"), trusteeship under the laws of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts
• Subject: Democracy / Election results / Elections / Macedonia-The Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia / Polls & surveys / Voter behavior