“There is no greater lie in democracy than lying in the name of citizens.” And this, according to Narciso MichavilaThis is what has been done for years at the Center for Sociological Research (CIS). The president of GAD3, one of the main demographic companies on the market, attended this Thursday the Senate commission of inquiry into the management of the socialist José Félix Tezanos in the CEI and his testimony served to denounce the “manipulation” of data which is in progress. . for an exclusively partisan purpose.
“I have no evidence that leads me to believe that the budget forecasts have any other purpose than manipulation,” Michavila said when asked by one of the senators. He specifically mentioned the usual love of the CEI to promote the electoral results of the PSOE and underestimate those of the Popular Party. Something that has led the center to be wrong in predicting almost all the processes of recent months, including the general and regional elections.
Michavila made several complaints in his speech, in which he criticized the fact that the IEC do not publish microdata -the information which contains the origin of all the estimates- up to several days (or even weeks) after having made their surveys or barometers public. “Sometimes we went to the polls without having this microdata in hand,” he noted.
The president of GAD3 explained how the CEI changed its methods to “manipulate issues,” cutting out the main concerns of the Spanish people to make them seem lesser.
To do this, he gave the example of the last known barometer, which placed immigration as the main problem of the Spaniards and warned that this was so, because other issues, such as politics (which became the one of the main concerns), were divided into several elementswhich means that the percentage of each of them is lower and they do not appear in the top positions.
Michavila also denounced that the CIS has become only a means of knowing the voting intention, which has led to the perversion of certain barometers – by introducing this question which did not exist before – and eliminating others which did not allow it to be asked. , such as immigration or the armed forces.
