Presidential election 2015 in Belarus

MINSK, 11 October (BelTA) - A group of five international observers confirmed the high quality of exit polls which were conducted by the Institute for Comparative Social Studies Eurasian Barometer, director of the institute Christian Haerpfer told reporters, BelTA has learned.

"Eurasian Barometer’s team included five international observers who were invited from Europe. They were from Austria, Germany, the United Kingdom, Switzerland, and Spain. They acted as consultants, and confirmed the high quality of the survey,” said Christian Haerpfer.

The exit polls were conducted by 909 pollers at 303 polling sites. The staff was apportioned according to the population of these regions. The work in Minsk was carried out at 61 poling stations. A total of 11,896 voters were polled. The team of pollers worked from 8:00 till 19:00.

All the information was sent to the headquarters in Minsk where it was processed by 28 operators.

The Eurasian Barometer conducted exit polls in Romania, Bulgaria and Ukraine. In Belarus the institute conducted such a survey for the first time. The exit polls were not carried out during early voting. In addition, Christian Haerpfer noted that the Eurasian Barometer conducted surveys on various topics in Belarus from 1994 till 2014.

In the 1990s the Eurasian Barometer conducted polls commissioned by the Austrian Government and the National Bank of Austria. Later the organization did surveys on request of the European Union, the International Organization for Migration and German companies such as Volkswagen. This time the exit polls in Belarus were commissioned by the ONT TV channel. For this reason Christian Haerpfer does not have the right to disclose the information on the budget of the survey as this runs contrary to the contract concluded with the ONT.

Director of the Sociology Institute of the National Academy of Sciences of Belarus Igor Kotlyarov said that they interviewed 10,000 people on the election day. The margin of error was plus or minus 3%. Some voters refused to answer questions.

The head of the Youth Laboratory of Social Studies of the Belarusian Committee of Youth Organizations Yuri Chernyak said that they worked on 308 polling sites from 8:00 till 20:00 and polled around 30,000 voters.