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Everyone should be well aware of the relationship between public opinion surveys and democratic development. The author has been discussing it in lectures and written articles for years. Today, the author would like to use it as the starting topic to revive his article series, and briefly discusses exit polling in coming Sunday’s District Council Elections.

The Registration and Electoral Office has approved these four organisations to conduct exit polls during the Election Day: Public Opinion Programme of The University of Hong Kong (HKUPOP), Hong Kong Research Association, Hong Kong Society Monitor and Association of Community in Hong Kong. The author will not comment on the background and past performances of individual organisations. In fact, back in October 2004, the author has already written an article to analyse the overall strategies and the resources deployment of different organisations which conducted exit polls during the 2004 Legislative Council Elections, and then emphasised the importance of setting “professional ethics for exit polls”. HKUPOP, headed by the author, never discloses any exit poll result to any candidate before the election closes. Even for media sponsors, POP would only inform them of the initial findings near the end of the elections to facilitate their news productions. Even then, these sponsors would have to sign an “exit poll charter” to declare their responsibilities in this regard.

To facilitate the development of exit polls and other public opinion surveys, the author always believes the less government restriction the better, the more free flow of information the better, and the earlier a professional code of practice could be established the better. The author, based on these principles, has made repeated submissions to various successions of the Electoral Affairs Commission on how to amend its exit poll guidelines and approval method.

This year, the author is glad to see the following measures adopted by the Electoral Affairs Commission and the Registration and Electoral Office:

1） An additional clause in the Guidelines, which states that “interviewers of approved exit poll should not speak to or communicate with candidates or their agents when conducting the poll outside polling stations”, and an explicit statement in the Guidelines which stipulates that if the applicant organisation or the interviewer “has publicly expressed support for any candidate(s) contesting in the constituency covered by the exit poll(s)”, “approval would normally not be granted”.

2） Introduction of the “statutory declaration made for the purpose of application to conduct exit poll”, which appears to have legal effect, requiring the applicant to pledge not to “release, directly or indirectly, the results of the exit poll” to any candidate or related organisation contesting in the constituencies covered by the exit poll.

The author welcomes the above-mentioned measures apparently aimed at cutting off all connections between research and political organisations. However, the author is worried that there might be gaps between the legislative intention and actual execution. Judging from the development of exit polls in Hong Kong, it is already an open secret that political organisations use exit poll as a tool for election engineering on the election day, and this involves not just one particular party, but different political camps. The author expects that many of the candidates running for the District Council Election this Sunday have already prepared to make “crisis calls for vote”. Let us hope that those candidates would not claim that such calls are based on the result of any exit polls, otherwise, they would have the responsibility to disclose the source of information and to bring the leaker to justice.

The author urges all organisations which intend to use exit poll for its election engineering to stop doing so immediately, no matter they had done so in the past or not. Instead, they should focus their effort on conducting their studies properly, in order to create space for the professional development of opinion studies in Hong Kong.