Who is charging the Fort?

A month since the posts ‘who will rule the fort’ and ‘who will storm the fort’ regarding elections in my home state of Tamil Nadu.  The counting is due tomorrow (13 May) and the results confirmed by evening.

The earlier posts might have left you confused, as they’ve me, even today.  The magazine Junior Vikatan had projected a 141 seat majority to the present opposition ADMK combine.

While I cross checked the projection, constituency by constituency with the projection by the daily Dinamalar, the results were startling.

• Junior Vikatan had ‘called’ all the constituencies - none were termed ‘too-close-to-call’; 
• However Dinamalar had hedged its bets and called 52 constituencies as ‘too-close-to-call’;
• Also Dinamalar and Junior Vikatan had called ‘18’ constituencies, against each other.

Thus was born the Excel/Google worksheet tabulating the results. 

• Each constituency was given/marked with ‘1’ against the ‘winner’ as per Junior Vikatan.
• Each constituency was then cross checked with Dinamalar projection and differences were marked thus:
  • where it was declared ‘too-close-to-call’ the cell was marked ‘turquoise’
  • where it was declared ‘different-to-Junior Vikatan’, the cell was marked ‘brown’

On 10th May, after the 6 phase elections in the state of West Bengal was over (and due to which the counting was kept in abeyance in the 4 states of Tamil Nadu, Pondicherry, Kerala and Assam), the media was free to publish exit polls and here is the summary: 

• Total seats in TN Legislative Assembly : 234
• Half way mark : 117
• The Junior Vikatan and Dinamalar figures are pre-poll survey*

Tamil Nadu	CNN	Asianet	NDTV	Headlines Today	Junior Vikatan	Dinamalar	in 2006
DMK+	102-114	102-117	101	115-130	92*	88*	163
ADMK+	120-132	117-132	131	105-120	141*	145*	69

Meantime Dinamalar had continued to publish its evaluation of projections throughout the month and changed to its own pre-poll projections.  So it was back to the excel/Google worksheet and this time:

• the total number of seats ‘too-close-to-call’ increased to 73 (again all marked turquoise) - DMK+ 41 and ADMK+ 32;
• the seats exit-polls ‘changed’ the pre-poll call were 19 (and were marked with ‘red 1’) - DMK+ 14 and ADMK+ 5; 
• the seats exit-polls ‘confirmed’ the pre-poll survey were 68 (and were marked with ‘green 1’) - DMK+ 16 and ADMK+ 52;
• the seats where there were no additional information were left alone, which totalled a whopping 146 - DMK+ 61 and ADMK+ 84
• BTW I have misplaced the Dinamalar projections of 30th Apr and 1st, 7th and 8th May, which would have contained info regarding some of the 146 seats.
• Dinamalar did something even more bizarre - of the 19 ‘changed’ seats, only 4 were what they had predicted as different from that of Junior Vikatan. 
• rest 14, agreed that Junior Vikatan was correct. 
• then went on to declare a further 15 as different from the earlier call.

8-)
Personally I do not think that any of them got it right, like the last 4 elections.  I think that the winning margin would be small - perhaps as low as 10+ seats. 

Here is the Google spreadsheet. As the results are declared, I plan to keep updating the sheet with the cell containing constituency name marked ‘Yellow’ or ‘Green’ to see how good the Junior Vikatan and Dinamalar calls were.

BTW I requested 4 neighbours to loan me the missing Dinamalar sheets, and was stunned at their response, ‘Oh! those! they’re misplaced somewhere; will try to get them, soon’.  8 hours later, I am still to get a peep.  Au contraire, if they need something from me like -

• make good their screwed up PC
• look up something for their benefit
• look at something of theirs and offer advice
• locate digital documents they’ve ‘mislaid’ in their own PC
• try and locate a person whom they want to get in touch with

and so on and so forth; it has to be immediate.  They would stand on my head, my bollocks and where not, till their requirement is satisfied.
:-(

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