As the Gujarat state assembly elections are approaching, the number of sponsored and bogus surveys is increasing again. Now an application has also come on social media through which anyone can make a poll and get people’s votes. With not getting much response on the ground, the Aam Aadmi Party has now taken up such surveys to gain some space in the popular discussions using such applications for the survey. However, after this practice by AAP was exposed, the posts shared by the leaders had to be deleted.
Although the Aam Aadmi Party had conducted such surveys in many assembly constituencies, it was finally exposed when it came to the Navsari assembly seat in Gujarat, and the posts shared by the Aam Aadmi Party leaders had to be deleted.
A poll was created on an app named StawPoll by Aam Aadmi Party workers in Navsari city and the link of this was also shared on various social media platforms. The theme of this survey was that if elections are held on the Navsari assembly seats, then which candidate will get how many votes?
According to the viral screenshot of this opinion poll, a total of 638 votes were cast. Of these, 562 votes went to the Aam Aadmi Party candidate, 66 votes to the Congress, and only 10 votes to the BJP candidate. The percentage of this vote share is 88.09%, 10.34%, and 1.57% respectively.
Looking at the results of the survey, prima facie it seems that the swing in the constituency is in favour of the Aam Aadmi Party in the Navsari assembly seat and if the election is held today, the AAP candidate will win with a huge majority. BJP has been winning the Navsari seat continuously since 1990 and every time the Congress party was in the second position. The current MLA is Piyushbhai Dinkerbhai Desai who won his second term in 2017, and the last non-BJP MLA in the constituency had won an election way back in 1985. Therefore, the poll showed a huge shift in votive preference in the seat.
However, soon the AAP survey was exposed to be dubious, and the truth behind the entire scandal came to the fore. It was found that only a small number of people had voted for AAP numerous times, pushing up the votes for the party.
In fact, while creating a poll on this app, the option is given whether the details of the persons who voted are to be made public or not. Also, there can be a setting where a person can vote only once. However, both options were not chosen while making this poll.
When the number of people who voted under this poll was seen, it was found that there were one or two names who had voted several times for AAP at the same time. Due to this, the percentage of the Aam Aadmi Party automatically increased.
In the screenshot, it can be seen that after a few votes, a large number of votes have been put together by two names Bhavin and Savla. When counted, only those two names crossed the figure of 100 votes each. However, after some users commented on the post shared by the Aam Aadmi Party leader in this regard, the post was finally deleted.
However, this was not the only post. Apart from this, the party has made several surveys on the same app. The results of these surveys are also being shared on social media platforms and these surveys were described as ‘the biggest survey of Gujarat’ and showed that the Aam Aadmi Party will form the government. But cases like this are enough to expose the actual credibility of such surveys.
Such surveys before the elections are not new for the Aam Aadmi Party. The party, which has been active for quite some time, has to resort to a similar survey to create a fuss. Even before the upcoming elections, the Aam Aadmi Party has tried to infuse enthusiasm among its workers by sharing the results of such sponsored surveys.