How accurate are polls in Afghanistan?
They’re better than they were before the country’s 2004 election but not nearly as good as Western polls. During the last presidential election, Hamid Karzai won with 55 percent of the vote. One prominent poll had predicted that Karzai would win 78 percent of the vote. Exit polls from the same organization, the International Republican Institute, a nonpartisan group established by Congress to support fledgling democracies, came much closer, missing the margin of victory by fewer than nine points. The failures of 2004 have led Afghan pollsters to improve their sampling techniques, and most analysts expect better results this time around.
