Pollster blames computing error after poll prediction fiasco

After its Bihar exit poll prediction went awry, Today’s Chanakya on Monday blamed computing error for the disaster. Also, news channel NDTV apologised for the erroneous exit poll and blamed wrong data for its initial projection favouring the NDA.

Today’s Chanakya, the only pollster to get the 2014 Lok Sabha exit poll prediction right, said after the results were declared, they examined how they went “so wrong” and where was the error at their end.
“We found that a simple computer template coding marking the alliances got interchanged at our end. Due to this our seat numbers remained the same but respective alliances got interchanged,” it stated.

Today's Chanakya missed the exit polls completely as it predicted 155 seats for the NDA and just 83 for the Grand Alliance but the results showed that the Grand Alliance won 178 seats while NDA was restricted to 58. Separately, NDTV admitted that there were errors in their exit poll and the projection of election results on the counting day. On Sunday, while the counting was progressing, NDTV had predicted that NDA would form the government and even gave 140 seats.

NDTV's Prannoy Roy said in a web post on the wrong projection given on Sunday that like every time, his channel as well as others received data from “one agency”, which is a “globally respected” agency. “The first data that came in to all news channels was completely wrong. Our trend analysis was based on this data like it has been for 35 years and it’s never been wrong so far. We showed the BJP ahead - that's what the data showed. The data, unfortunately, turned out to be incorrect. All news channels had to change their data half-way,” he said. Roy said this “never happened before” and NDTV has asked the agency for an explanation.