Times Now has the most ‘accurate’ opinion poll on Uttar Pradesh

Last night, Times Now announced its ‘definitive’, ‘most accurate’ poll survey called the VMR Opinion Survey 2017.

The poll claims to predict the results of the UP Assembly election and offers an insight into the mind of the average UP voter. Using an immense sample size of, wait for it, 7500 people, anchor Rahul Shivshankar declared unequivocally that this poll would “set the template” for other TV news channels. We thought we’d place that sample size in perspective so you can decide how seriously you’d like to take this poll survey. Your welcome.

Times Now claims that it surveyed 7,500 respondents from Uttar Pradesh for their poll. Based on these numbers we try to deconstruct the possible number of respondents per district, constituency and village.

Since they surveyed 7,500 respondents from 24 districts, the number of respondents per district would breakdown to= (7500/24)  = 312.5

There are 75 districts in UP. And on an average, each district has almost 5.3 assembly seats. In this case, the number of respondents per constituency narrows down to = (312.5/ 5.3) = 59

Uttar Pradesh has 1,06,774 villages. We calculated the number of respondents per village– assuming that the channel’s “definitive opinion” poll was spread “across” the state–surveyed was atleast one-third of the total villages, that is, 35,591. That comes to (7500/35,591) .21 respondents per village.