New Rights Snub Planned Exit Polls

The New Rights Party, whose leader Davit Gamkrelidze is a presidential candidate, said it doesn’t trust exit polls planned by four national television stations.

Four networks – the Georgian Public Broadcaster (GPB), Rustavi 2 TV, Mze TV and Adjara TV – have jointly commissioned exit polls for the January 5 presidential election and plebiscites. The Georgian Institute of Public Affairs (GIPA), Ilia Chavchavadze State University and two think-tanks – the Caucasus Institute for Peace, Democracy and Development (CIPDD) and the Georgian Foundation for Strategic and International Studies (GFSIS) have been charged with managing the exit polls. Six local research groups – IPM, ACT, Sarke, ISSA, ISR, ARC – have been contracted to conduct field work. Exit poll results will be available as soon as polling stations close at 8 pm local time on January 5

“We have no trust in the proposed exit polls planned by the four television stations,” MP Mamuka Katsitadze of the New Rights Party said at a news conference on December 26. “But we do trust the planned parallel vote tabulation [PVT].”

Two election watchdog groups, International Society for Fair Elections and Democracy (ISFED) and New Generation-New Initiative (nGnI), are planning on conducting PVT, which entails counting votes simultaneously with officials from precinct election commissions.
 
.