Why can the results of the presidential election be so different from one media to another? Sunday evening, when millions of French people were glued to their television screens, the main news channels gave Emmanuel Macron the lead in the second round at different figures. When BFMTV announced 57.6% of the votes cast for the current head of state, France Télévisions expected 58.2%, TF1 58% and CNews 57.9% of the votes. Yet the final result is none of them, now standing at 58.54% for Emmanuel Macron.
Why are the results so precise and also so different?
“Simply because we constitute samples of representative polling stations and necessarily, there is always a small gap”, explains Bernard Sananès, president of the Elabe institute.
“For example, we saw in the evening that the more the offices of Île-de-France entered, the more Emmanuel Macron rose compared to the initial estimate. Something happened which was interesting compared to the first round. , is that the reports of the votes of the voters of Jean-Luc Mélenchon on Emmanuel Macron were better in Île-de-France than in the rest of the territory. And that is what made this small delta of one point “, he continues on Europe 1.
“I really rely on the results of the first ballots counted because it has happened that the polls, on the day of the vote, do not quite correspond to the reality of the ballots counted”, comments Bernard Sananès. He therefore recommends waiting until 7:15 p.m., the time when the first ballots counted from the electronic polling stations arrive.
“I had a first trend at 7:12 p.m. It moved until 7:45-48 p.m. and then it moved again until 10 p.m. But the trend, we had it quite early, but not at 2 p.m., not at 3 p.m., that’s fantasies,” he concludes.