The story SIAR told us on election day about our interviewers was the start of our uncertainty about some of the work being done for us by ACSDA. In a key district, interviewers at thirteen of the twenty precincts could not be located at midday at their sample polling places. There and elsewhere in Baku we received different vote reports from both the interviewers and their supervisors. The supervisors’ reports in many districts were questionable. We learned of the problem almost immediately, as the computer system would not accept a second report from a precinct without a telephone supervisor interceding and canceling the first. Apparently, the interviewers had not been let in on the attempted deception. Once the problem was discovered, the interviewers were re-contacted to verify their vote reports. We did not project winners for the worst of these districts.

We had other problems with ACSDA. Questionnaires were to be delivered to our headquarters on election night from some of the districts in and around Baku, Azerbaijan’s capital. We intended to verify the hand-counted vote reports that had been phoned in as an additional check on the veracity of the work done by the interviewers. We also planned to key the answers to the seven questions on the exit poll questionnaire. Mysteriously, many questionnaires never showed up. When we inquired about their whereabouts, we were told they were delivered to some other site and could not be retrieved. Again, this happened in a number of the Baku districts, all organized by ACSDA.

Our condition for conducting the exit polls was that we would release our results to the media soon after poll closing. We said the sponsor could see our results before we posted them, but we would choose what, where, and when to report. So much for good intentions! We were prepared to report the results in two tables on our website at poll closing time. There were links to this site on the Mitofsky International and Edison Media Research websites. Our partner, Vladimir Andreenkov, had a link on the Russian version of his website, and ACSDA had one its website.

The first table showed the name and party of the winners. Projections of winners were made only when the margin between the top candidates was greater than the sampling error by a factor large enough to provide at most a 1 percent chance of an error. All districts without winners were listed as “too close to call,” and the names of the top two candidates were given. The second table was a summary of seats won by each party.

At poll closing time, our sponsor asked to see the tables before we posted them. They agreed to the party summary table being posted, but not the district-by-district winners. They wanted to have a “private” conversation, we were told, without us present. They did not say with whom they would have this conversation. They would get back to us. We were told that posting the results by district that night could result in civil unrest.

They finally got back to us Monday afternoon—twenty hours later. At that time, they pointed out conflicts between our results, the Saar exit poll and the results from the election commission. As we were not sure what to make of the conflicts, we initially published our district results without naming winners in those uncertain districts. We have since published the estimated percentages for the top three candidates for all but two districts. Winners have been called, where the results met our criteria. We omitted the percentages from districts 19 and 36. The dual reporting by interviewers and supervisors makes any result in those two districts too uncertain.

We also published an analysis of the vote for the country and for various regions. It shows only minor differences in the voting patterns by age, gender, education or occupation. Overall, independent candidates got 39 percent of the vote. The government-party, or YAP, candidates had 32 percent, and the Freedom Block, a coalition of three opposition parties, received 14 percent. The rest was scattered among a number of parties. Three-quarters of the voters told us they expected their votes to be counted fairly. The only real differences are in the regional support for the YAP. It is weakest of all in the capital, Baku, and neighboring regions to the center and northeast of the country.