Hot Like Pepper - NACTA vindicated with election result - Politics

Politics : NACTA vindicated with election result

2007/11/8 14:34:00

NACTA pollster Vishnu Bisram says he feels vindicated. Bisram was commenting on the result of the general election in Trinidad and Tobago and the criticism levelled against him and his polling organization.

Bisram's polls had suggested all through the election campaign that the People's National Movement (PNM) would win the election unless there was an accomodation of some kind to combine the opposition vote.

His last figures before the vote showed that the PNM was ahead in 16 seats, the UNC Alliance was in the lead in 14 and the rest were too close to call. However, he said if all the oppositon votes were combined in a one-to-one race, the PNM would lose. And he said the Congress of the People (COP) was not going to win a single seat.

That annoyed the COP to the extent that it launched an attack on Bisram and NACTA's credibility suggesting all his polls were bogus and partisan.

In fact, there were full-page advertisements in the daily newspapers by an unknown source, stating that the NACTA polls were flawed.

The ads quoted political activists from within the Caribbean and the United States who chastised Bisram for the predictions he had made in their respective countries.

Bisram had accurately predicted the results of general elections in Trinidad and Tobago on several occasions, including 1991, 1995 and 2001. No other polling organization in the country was even close to the actual results the NACTA polls forecast.

And NACTA was correct again in 2007. "I told you so," he said.