Prevention is better than cure – Desiderius Erasmus
Since 2016, I’ve been telling VP Leni’s people to speak up against fake news. To face and combat it, pero anong sabi nila sakin, ayaw daw nilang lumaban noon kasi masyadong popular si Duterte.
Hindi pa daw tamang oras, hindi daw maganda na you lay out all your cards on the table.
Sabi ko anong point eh they will eventually hit her naman, might as well go down fighting.
At least nakikita ng mga tao na you can’t be bullied and you stand for something just like what Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. did.
I also told them about the “Miriam Defensor Santiago Phenomenon” na kaya ang relevant pa rin nya ngayon maski sobrang tagal na nyang patay eh dahil she never backs out maski all the odds are against her. (personally di ko siya gusto pero she is a good example of the point I was trying to make)
People respect women who stand up for themselves just like what Rowena Guanzon is doing today. At least man lang sana Leni tried to fight through the platform of her office pero wala eh.
Para sa kanya people will just recognize the good things she’s been doing through her Angat Buhay programs.
I remember a conversation I had with a former PCGG commissioner, I asked him if he talked to Jovito Salonga on the Marcoses being put to justice, he said that Salonga told him to “trust the justice system and to trust that the Filipino people will always do the right thing.”
Ito rin daw yung sinabi ni Cory and Pnoy, to “always trust that our people will choose and do the right thing.”
Pero ang malungkot dito that’s not how reality works.
Ito rin ang mistake ni Pnoy when he was alive, kaya ayun napuruhan ng mga Yolanda at SAF44 propaganda hanggang sa bumaho na ang imahe nya sa mga tao.
Hindi na bago ang strategy ng fake news, ginagamit ito kahit noong unang panahon pa para magkalat ng gulo sa mga kalabang kaharian na gustong sakupin para magkaron ng unrest sa mga tao.
Ang sagot sakin kaya hindi hinaharap ni Leni ang mga bashers nya usually eh dahil daw hindi siya “Trapo” (traditional politician) at hindi nya nature yung nakikipag-away. Ayun na bully tuloy siya.
Kasi ang problema ng fake news eh it compounds in the long run what the followers of BBM and Sara did was to ramp up their fake news propaganda kasi nga wala naman silang consequence na haharapin and yung tinitira nile eh tahimik lang so ang iisipin ng mga tao eh ‘baka nga totoo yung mga paratang sa kanya kaya ayaw nyang mag-react’.
Silence means consent nga daw sabi ng iba.
Also back then everyone knew na siya ang pinaka legitimate na opposition leader.
Pero wala.
Para sakin kasi ang pagtakbo bilang Presidente ay pinag-pa-planuhan.
Taon ang ginugugol dyan hindi yung kung kelan mo gustong tumakbo automatic gusto ka na ng mga tao.
Yan ang advantage ng camp ni BBM ang puhunan nila eh yung ilang taon na puros fake news and yung lack of preparation ni Leni, actually himala na lang na gumagalaw ang mga tao ngayon kasi for the last few years hindi naman talaga nagpresenta si Leni bilang opposition leader. Madami nang lumapit sa kanya noon pero kebs talaga siya.
Later na lang nung sobra nang palpak si Duterte.
Pero the damage has been done, and proof ng success ng fake news eh yung hindi niya paggamit ng kulay na dilaw plus yung pagtakbo nya bilang independent.
In reality madami ang naasar dun at isa na ako dun dahil ang mga dilaw ang nagdala sa kanya sa pagka VP tapos all of a sudden ilalaglag niya yung kulay pati ang LP.
Ang sakit lang di ba?
Pero ang mga dilaw all knew na what she did was a political maneuver and a band-aid solution sa ilang taong fake news.
Back then ang sinasabi nila na ang tunay na concern talaga ni Leni kaya she wasn’t that active sa protest movement eh dahil pinoprotektahan nya ang mga anak nya.
Turns out titirahin din ng mga fake news ang mga anak nya.
So my unfortunate prediction is mananalo si BBM and Sara.
Kaya sobrang kampante nila at wala silang panahon makipag debate dahil sa totoo lang tapos na ang mga debate 12 years ago nung nagtatanim sila ng mga fake news sa lahat ng social media.
Ang hindi narerealize ng mga kakampink ay ang halaga ng good preparation and precise/strategic targeting and this has been proven last 2019 nung walang ni isang nanalo sa otso deretso.
Just imagine, we were still being asked by other CSO’s to convince Leni to run from July last year until the last day when she decided to run in October.
Kaya rin maraming tao ngayon sa mga rally ni Leni ay dahil narerealize na ng mga pinoy na huli na ang lahat at kailangan gumalaw. Which is a typical pinoy behavior, na kung kelan malala na ang sakit saka lang mag-papaospital.
In reality dapat noon pa itong movement ni Leni at Kiko, noong mga panahong nilibing si Marcos sa LNMB dapat nakatindig sila or nung nagdedebate pa lang sa korte suprema kung dapat ilibing si Marcos sa LNMB.
In previous posts [F1] we noted the following “flaws” [F2] about the allocation of the sample respondents of the Pulse Asia (PA) survey to various groups:
(1) Underrepresentation of the 18-41 age group and overrepresentation of the 58 or over age group;
(2) Underrepresentation of those who reached college; overrepresentation of those who did not reach college; and
(3) Underrepresentation of those who belong to the ABC socio-economic classes (SEC) [F3]; overrepresentation of those belonging to the DE classes combined.
Thus, we concluded that if there are relatively more Leni supporters from the young, from those with higher educational attainment, and from those with higher socio-economic classification status, then the PA survey is biased against Leni!
For this post, we tried to “rectify” the flaws/biases by adjusting & reweighting the 16-21 March 2022 survey results [F4] by:
(a) Using the distribution of the population by 1SEC 2017 [F5] instead of the actual distribution of the PA sample respondents using its own SEC classification;
(b) Using the distribution of the educational attainment of the population 18 years or over (the voting age population) from the Philippine Statistics Authority (PSA) [F6] instead of the actual distribution of the PA sample respondents by educational attainment;
(c) Using the distribution of the registered voters by age from the COMELEC instead of the actual age distribution of the PA sample respondents;
(d) Assuming (quite arbitrarily though) a certain Marcos-Robredo sharing of the votes for the groups for which adjustments are made to account for the “flaws” mentioned earlier.
It may be recalled that in the 16-21 March 2022 PA survey, nationwide, Marcos got 56% compared to 24% for Leni or a difference of 32%.
From the attached tables,
• If we ( refer to Table SS v2.0 5/02/2022-01)
o use the 1SEC 2917 instead of the PA SEC,
o allocate sample respondents to the A & B classes in accordance with the 1SEC 2017,
o assume a 60-40 vote in favor of Leni among the A & B classes, and
o without touching all the other components,
the nationwide count becomes 53.7% for Marcos and 29.3% for Leni. Thus the difference is reduced from 32% to 24.4%, still a huge margin.
• On the other hand, If we ( refer to Table SS v2.0 5/02/2022-02)
o adjust for the underrepresentation in the sample of those who reached college,
o use the PSA distribution instead of the PA distribution by educational attainment,
o assume a 60%-40% vote in favor of Leni among those who reached college, and
o without touching the other components,
the nationwide gap is reduced from 56%-24% to 48.8%-31.2% , again, still a big difference of 17.6% in favor of Marcos.
• However, if we ( refer to Table SS v2.0 5/02/2022-03)
o adjust for the underrepresentation of the younger age group (18-41) by using the COMELEC distribution of registered voters by Age,
o assume a 55%-45% vote in favor of Leni among those aged 18-41 and among those aged 42-57,
o retain the 56%-24% vote from the March PA survey in favor of Marcos among those aged 58 or over, and
o without touching all the other components,
Leni takes over the lead by a close vote of 40.4% to 39.6%.
Thus, the biggest source of possible bias of the PA survey in favor of Marcos is the underrepresentation of the young voters in the PA sample of respondents. And if this is corrected under certain assumptions, this alone will be sufficient to turn the tables around in favor of Leni. Reminds us of the 2016 race for vice president. But this of course depends on the validity of the assumptions made. Do you think the assumption of a 55%-45% vote in favor of Leni from those aged 18-57 is reasonable?
The slight lead of Leni will however get bigger if
we assume a 60%-40% vote count for those aged 18-41 in favor of Leni, instead of 55%-45%, and/or
in addition to the weighting adjustment made because of the underrepresentation of young respondents in the PA sample, we are able to adjust also for the underrepresentation by educational attainment and by SEC as well as adjust for the Don’t Know/Refused votes, without double counting, of course Unfortunately, we cannot do this due to data availability constraints.
Despite what Pulse Asia predicts, as a former teacher of probability theory and user of its concepts in my everyday life, including in the mind game of bridge, plus what Google Trends has been indicating for some time now, I dare say that the chances of Leni becoming our President in June are quite good!
Moreover, may I just point out that in the 2016 presidential elections in the United States, the American Association for Public Opinion Research [E2], found that the biggest culprit for the “polling failure” that wrongly predicted a Clinton victory [F7] was “state-level polling underestimating the level of Trump’s support, most importantly in Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin”. The biggest reasons for the discrepancy were
(1) a substantive change in vote preference during the campaign’s final days,
(2) a failure to properly adjust for an overrepresentation of college graduates, and
(3) many Trump voters failing to reveal their preferences until after the election which could have also been the result of late-deciding Trump voters.
which could have parallelisms in the Philippine 2022 elections.
Also, our question on the integrity of the PA sample vis-à-vis the possible infiltration by trolls remains. Trolls are a recent phenomenon so pollsters may have been unprepared to manage them! If some people/organization(s) have advance information on the sample barangays and possibly sample households of any poll firm, not just of Pulse Asia, surely, and maybe, quite easily depending on availability of resources, they can pay “trolls” to try to influence the respondents. When this happens, the validity of the survey results becomes highly questionable, indeed! And the possibility that the Google Trends might in fact, “predict” better who will win!
Certainly, the pollsters, the media, and the public, including the politicians, should recognize and accept the fact that election polls had gone wrong, and could go wrong for valid, understandable reasons! And it is about time politicians learned to accept defeat graciously!
Finally, noting the failures [F8] of election polls in recent years, we reiterate our call that after the May 2022 elections, for Pulse Asia to very seriously review not only its survey design but also its entire business process to assure the public of the integrity of its surveys in the future!
[F1]: The series of posts was released on 24 March, 02 April, 05 April, 12 April, and 18 April. Some of the data references for this post can be found in the series of past posts. We also realized just again, that the FB/Meta has not been capturing the footnotes of our past posts.
[F2]: The “flaws” are the result of the PA survey design which uses regions as domains. Thus, the survey is not intended to be able to generate reliable estimates by age, educational attainment, or socio-economic classification status of the respondents. We discovered the “flaws” after the survey had been conducted and are about the “inconsistency” of the profile of the sample respondents when compared with other data sources like those from the COMELEC, the Philippine Statistics Authority and the !SEC 2017 socio-economic classification system.
[F3]: Actually, the A & B classes have zero representation.
[F4]: The results for the 16-21 March 2022 survey are the latest available as of 01 May 2022.
[F5]: The 1SEC 2017 is an output of a project funded by the World Bank and spearheaded by Assoc. Prof. Genelyn Ma. F. Sarte of the UP School of Statistics, using data from a rider to the 2018 Labor Force Survey of the PSA.
[F6]: Based on the 2015 Population Census, the latest available national level data on educational attainment from the PSA.
[F7]: But Clinton did win in the popular vote.
[F8]: We refer to the 2016 presidential elections in the USA, the 2019 federal elections in Australia, the 2015 elections in the UK, and to a minor extent, the 2010 and 2016 elections in the Philippines, among others.
Endnotes:
[E1]: Romulo A. Virola is formerly with the Actuarial Research and Development Group of the GSIS, and a former Professorial Lecturer in the Graduate Programs of the Statistical Center/School of Statistics and the Department of Mathematics (now the Institute of Mathematics) of the University of the Philippines . He retired in 2012 as Secretary General of the then National Statistical Coordination Board (NSCB) of the Philippines or NSCB (now part of the Philippine Statistics Authority).
He finished his BS (Mathematics) from UP, and MS (Actuarial Mathematics), MA (Statistics), and PhD (Statistics) from the University of Michigan, where he was a Fellow in its Sampling Program for Foreign Statisticians under the late Prof. Leslie Kish, author of the pioneering “Survey Sampling”, considered by many as the bible in the field. He pursued his MS Actuarial Mathematics degree as a GSIS scholar in Michigan.
He received an award as one of the Ten Outstanding Researchers from the National Research Council of the Philippines (NRCP). He used to write/co-write the Statistically Speaking articles posted on the NSCB website from 2004 until his retirement.
The author thanks his former colleagues in the National Statistical System (NSS) of the Philippines particularly from the NSCB, Jay Mendoza of IOM, UN Migration Agency and some FB adviser-friends-former classmates for the assistance and support in sustaining the preparation of posts for the Statistically Speaking v.2.0. We also thank FB friends and readers who like/share our posts and/or contribute their insights towards a better appreciation of the issues and concerns raised by Statistically Speaking v.2.0.
Taon ang ginugugol dyan hindi yung kung kelan mo gustong tumakbo automatic gusto ka na ng mga tao.
In reality dapat noon pa itong movement ni Leni at Kiko, noong mga panahong nilibing si Marcos sa LNMB dapat nakatindig sila or nung nagdedebate pa lang sa korte suprema kung dapat ilibing si Marcos sa LNMB.
In previous posts [F1] we noted the following “flaws” [F2] about the allocation of the sample respondents of the Pulse Asia (PA) survey to various groups: