On June 1, Saturday evening, several online media outlets reported data presented as results of ESTAT research on electoral attitudes in the country. My team and I cannot characterize such an event as anything other than a malicious manipulation of our work.
This is what Ivo Zelev, the head of the agency, wrote to FAKTI. Here is the rest of his statement:
"And since our firm does not want to suffer reputational damage from politicians who traditionally resort to desperate moves in the final days of the campaign, we feel it necessary to make a brief comment.
The data reported in the publications are grossly inaccurate and manipulative, accompanied by biased commentary. Inadmissible suggestions are being made on our behalf.
Yes, ESTAT has several election questions in its latest omnibus, but our research was far from over at the time of “publications”.
We want to clearly state that ESTAT Agency did not send data to any media within the current election campaign. The agency has not commented and analyzed the indicated data, what suggestions are made in the published materials.
Unofficially and illegitimately, intermediate (partial) data probably found its way into a political power team that produced and provided one or more media outlets with the “publication” in question.
It is also worrying, in our opinion, that no journalist has so far sought out the ESTAT team to get confirmation, ask questions or at least request clarifications on the publications in question. Such uncriticalness and omnivorousness are frightening.
The information that has been provided to the media is from an intermediate processing done long before the completion of our research, which is also evident from the quoted total number of respondents.
The incomplete sample does not reproduce the structure of the population according to the main socio-demographic characteristics and does not correspond at all to the structure of the electorate and its attitudes.
At the time of publication of the information, ESTAT did not conduct a field control to establish the reliability of the information, did not apply software control and did not perform the necessary weighting and other statistical procedures to refine the data.
The author of the “publication” is extremely manipulative. has disclosed data on distribution among all voters entitled to vote in the country. At this stage of the campaign, every serious agency should publicize data among the voting voters.
All this makes the data announced on behalf of ESTAT inadequate and the differences between them and the registered results among voters from other sociological agencies are striking. After all, in the name of certain political goals, the good name of the ESTAT agency is harmed. This is something we absolutely do not accept.
We declare that we dissociate ourselves from the apparent attempt to manipulate voter attitudes in the final days of the campaign.
We are also disappointed by the lack of criticism of those media outlets that published the material without checking apparently dubious data, accompanied by tendentious and poor-quality commentary.
ESTAT Agency learned the necessary lessons. We will protect our data better in the future and select our contacts.
We understand how high the stakes are for the participants in the elections, but we will not allow ourselves to be an accomplice in someone's public actions aimed at confusing and misleading the media audience and ultimately the Bulgarian voters".