One may wonder, why all the exit polls? In a word, OIL. Azerbaijan is an oil-rich country by the Caspian Sea, with a brand new pipeline to Turkey and the Mediterranean Sea. There is lots of interest in that oil, and in having Azerbaijan’s government stable and friendly to the Western countries. Azerbaijan, which is strategically located near both Afghanistan and Iraq and borders Iran, also is friendly to U.S. military bases.

Exit polls, as we have seen, have been used more than once to discredit elections in emerging democracies where ruling parties were expected to falsify the vote. They can also be used to validate outcomes where there has been an honest count. An exit poll in Afghanistan, for example, that was funded by Washington lent credibility to Ahmed Karzai’s claim to a majority in the country’s recent presidential election. Given the announced intent of the Azeri government to conduct an honest election this time, the opportunity to give it credence was presumably a factor in the funding of the AID poll. It was also the avowed purpose of our own clients.

We met the sponsors of our exit poll for the first time in Baku, the capital city of Azerbaijan, in July to finalize arrangements. They seemed genuinely interested in democracy and had worked with other nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) to further its aim in Azerbaijan. We agreed to do the exit polls once our clients agreed that we, not they, could release the results of our exit poll to the media shortly after the voting was over. They made this pledge, but in the end they did not live up to it. Renaissance Associates, the company that hired us, was a Swiss company, run by a Bulgarian.

Yes, we had doubts about the source of the money. We had some thoughts that the money was coming from a government. Whose government it was coming from was uncertain, though the one in Baku was an obvious possibility. In our naiveté we thought it would make no difference, as long as we could do our work unimpeded, and until election day there was no interference. Once the polls had closed and it was time to release the results, the story would be different.

On that July trip, we hired three local organizations to work with us on election day. We divided the interviewing between the Association for Civil Society Development in Azerbaijan (ACSDA) and Sociological Research and Socio-Economic Forecasting Center (QAFQAZ). ACSDA did the interviewing in ninety election okrugs, or parliamentary districts, and QAFQAZ did the work in the other thirty-five. ACSDA had done polling for our client and QAFQAZ worked for years with Vladimir Andreenkov, our Russian partner at CESSI.

The country has more than five thousand polling stations, or about forty per okrug. We selected probability samples of either ten or twenty polling locations per district, depending on how close the vote in that district was expected to be. In the end, we had interviewers stationed at over fourteen hundred polling locations throughout Azerbaijan—as many locations as we had covered in the U.S. presidential election exit poll in 2004. Most districts were not expected to be close. For the last highly suspect parliamentary election, only two districts had even a moderately close election. The rest had been landslides, according to the official vote returns.

We used current registration for the sample selection and stratified each district on the size of the polling locations. The past election results were not much help for either the stratification or for making ratio estimates. We did not have much confidence in the past results where they were obtainable. In a number of polling stations they were not available, having been voided by the election commission due to irregularities.

We were concerned about the accuracy of the exit poll votes that we would receive. An exit poll done by Penn, Schoen, and Berland for the Venezuela recall vote on President Hugo Chavez in 2004, which showed a landslide for dumping Chavez when a landslide backed him in the official count, was called into question, among other reasons, when it turned out that the interviewers were tied to anti-Chavez activists.

To protect ourselves against that contingency, we hired another Azeri survey company, SIAR Social and Marketing Research Center, to monitor the interviewing. SIAR had no responsibility for the conduct of the interviews. Its only role was to send monitors to a subsample of our precincts to assure us that the interviewing was being done according to our procedures. There were 105 monitors covering more than one-third of all of our sample locations. Each was assigned a subsample of the polling locations in the exit poll. All the districts where the race was expected to be close were included in the monitoring. We received reports from the SIAR monitors throughout election day so we could catch problems with interviewers at the polling places. We also used the reports from the monitors to help us judge the reliability of the data we were receiving.