Last week Bobi Wine, released a detailed report produced by Dr. Nico Schoonderwoerd a seasoned European researcher with detailed supplement by an American lawyer on the violence in the last polls and the report claims that the elections had a wide range of irregularities to the extent that we cannot know who won.
I have read it and it is over 200 pages. That is almost a PhD dissertation. It has so much depth and they must have done a lot of work to put it together.
I still do not think those elections were rigged. I instead think that NRM campaigned especially using door to door and some cash in that process. However, the report strongly differs and brings its own evidence to the table. It is quite convincing.
The most important part for me is it alluded to our research conducted in November to conclude that there were national indicators that Bobi Wine could win. Having concluded that we were independent enough by distancing us from all the candidates (as the report states on page 7 that “Joel Isabirye is not personally affiliated with any of the candidates.”), the research confirms that we used the largest sample and got Kampala almost correct, with a 1% difference in the final outcome. As such, it argues that Kampala had more civic awareness and it was difficult to manipulate the outcome as it concludes happened elsewhere.
The report through independent analyses says our research was the most accurate and questions all the other polls. That made us blush. But our research actually did not turn out correct in most of the regions except Kampala, although we went through all of them. And their report implicitly states that it is because those places had malpractices and they provide sufficient evidence to back the assertions.
In April this year, Dr. Nico Schoonderwoerd author of the report started digging out for more information about our research as he was putting together his report that started way before the election. Having done his own polls with Whatsapp numbers before the election, it was natural that anyone would think he was biased because he was the author of his own report. But his results were similar to ours. When he found this out in April, he established contacts with us. He asked us for the extended abstract of the survey which we sent to him.
He then asked so many questions that at some point we wondered why we were answering any way. He asked us to list some of the villages we went to and he immediately verified if those villages existed. He asked what our anti-manipulation measures were and we told him. He asked if I had a personal relationship with Bobi Wine and if Bobi Wine could have influenced the outcome of our polls. I said no and had not spoken to him in quite a while. He asked how we funded the survey being that national surveys are so expensive to conduct. We answered that to his satisfaction. The questions were too many. But we answered all of them and showed him photographs of different towns and villages that we visited. This was going on as he did parallel investigations as researchers normally do. In the end I think he was convinced that we did the survey and the results were accurate at the time.
He tried to do the same with AfroBarometer and he says they were not so cooperative and questions their outcome. I told him AfroBarometer at a Strategic Level is difficult to manipulate. But at the fieldwork level, that is where polls and surveys can be manipulated and one must be extremely careful with the deployment of local assistants (with local allegiances even at district level), insist on back checking (without notice), and use some fraud proof questions about localities to test whether the data was really from that area. Where you have a single doubt that the results are altered, go back to the field and re-do them.
I was super impressed with his research skills, data verification procedures and ethical considerations. He was thorough.
What he did not say was that our poll was also almost close to the finally margins: 59.1% and 35% for the winner and the runner up although the names turned out to be the opposite. And of course we got the second runner up correct. LOL.
The question I have been asked by many people, is how come the results turned out different from our survey in many places. My response has always been, a campaign is a campaign. If people did not aim to change or improve their result, they would not campaign. After all they will win. But every candidate campaigned.
On the request of her legal team, we did a survey for Stella Nyanzi in August 2020 as she prepared to stand for Woman MP Kampala. She was the leading candidate by that time and voters outlined several reasons why they would vote for her.
But by nomination period, in the National Electoral Survey we did, Shamim Malende had taken over. As this was happening, I explained to Adam Kungu (who then was with Top Television and now works with Radio 4 and Baba TV) how these polls work.
While Nyanzi concentrated more on media, Malende switched her gear to the ground. Almost every day you would see or hear her teams in some part of Kampala pushing Malende and her core message was not standing up to power (which was the driving factor for Nyanzi) it was her role in People Power/NUP as Bobi Wine’s lawyer and the lawyer of all those arrested people who were in her own words ‘being victimized for fighting a dictator.’ Bobi Wine was the key factor here. If Nyanzi had got his endorsement or if he had remained publicly undecided like it was with the Mayoral race, Nyanzi would be in parliament today.
Malende’s message was being delivered down to the grassroots. She would even give updates of which prison she has gone to or who she is going to sort out bail for next week. Then came the Bobi Wine endorsement which practically pushed all the NUP parliamentary candidates in Kampala. Some like Derrick Nyeko would not appear in some places but simply leave the Drive Promotion cars to play back Bobi Wine’s endorsement throughout the day.
Eventually in the final result, Malende had won.
For research, we use the term intervening variables to suggest factors, conditions, situations that may shape the outcome of the relationship between two different variables, which in this case would be candidate (independent) or campaign processes (independent) and electoral outcome (dependent). Even rainfall can change an electoral outcome especially if one candidate does not have diehard supporters who can brave a heavy downpour to come out and vote. It is like an outdoor concert.
According to the report produced by Dr. Nico Schoonderwoerd there were four intervening variables that changed the anticipated victory of Bobi Wine. The report says these factors were coordinated and intentional: violence, intimidation, bribery and alteration of the Declaration of Results (DOR or DR) forms.
It is true there was violence, and it was unprecedent. It is also true that the bribery was probably more than it was in previous elections and cut across from presidential to MP to local council levels. What I am not so certain about is the alteration of the Declaration forms. I have to read that part of Dr. Nico Schoonderwoerd’s report in detail to understand the evidence presented. I have not seen why Museveni can alter DR forms and give himself only 58%. Wouldn’t he at least take it over 60% to look better? But I will look at the report and see the evidence adduced because it has depth.
I thank my teams who crisscrossed the country carrying out the survey. At one point as we started getting the results in, I thought: my people (research assistants) might be Kyagulanyi supporters. How come these numbers are so high? But our back checking team and I personally verified through backchecking established that indeed the results were reflective of what was on the ground, with the exception of Kamuli where the antimanipulation measures demonstrated that the first results perhaps were not collected but merely inserted so we had to redo it.
Some of the team told me not to release the report stating that we would face the wrath of the State. I told them; Museveni is more tolerant than he is projected to be. Sometimes he gets out of character but overall if he saw these results, he would instead increase his campaign spend instead of going after us. There is nothing Museveni likes more than advance warning about anything.
I doubt if he saw them but I saw NRM step up its campaign activities and efforts overall (which I think they had planned anyway) and it was good for the party and the president for them to do that.
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