As for all polls, the survey institutes will play an important role in estimating the results in the first and second round of the presidential election.
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Survey institutes, highly visible before elections to measure trends and projections, also have a very important role in the evening of polls. Between 19 hours and 20 hours, at the moment when the last polling stations close, then throughout the evening, they are the ones who realize the estimates of the results. These calculations are not made from polls at the output of the polls, but on the basis of the first scrubbers. When these estimates are sufficiently consolidated, they are revealed by the media.
A sensitive moment, especially when the result is tight – as in the 2002 presidential election, where Jean-Marie Le Pen (National Front) qualified in the second round with 16.86% of the votes, obliging Lionel Jospin (Socialist Party) to retire political (16.18%). Sunday, April 10 and Sunday, April 24, at the two rounds of the presidential election, the Ipsos Institute will mobilize several hundred people to get the information back, enter them and analyze them.
before the vote: Choice of offices analyzed
This work begins with the selection of polling stations that will be scrutinized. Each institute chooses a panel of voting places whose average of the partial results will have to reflect the final result as faithfully. Whether for a presidential election or for municipal elections, this selection is based on the analysis of the last ballot.
The idea is not necessarily to find voting offices where voters will vote as all French people or as all citizens of a town, but rather to find that reflect a trend (an office where the ecologist vote is very marked, a bastion of the right, etc.) and to average it. This panel therefore changes with each election according to possible redistricting or evolutions measured during past polls.
19 hours: Return of the first results
By polling day, a representative of the institutes is present in each selected polling station. Its mission is to follow the public stripping. From 19 hours, the moment of closing the first offices, the chain is set up. Each representative of the institutes sends the results of the first 100 newsletters stripped in his office. Then the scores of the first 200 newsletters, 300, etc. At the headquarters of the institutes, this information is seized and integrated with software that corrects certain biases (the first stripped offices are more socialist, centrist …?) To try to estimate the final total. Some results are drawn quite quickly.
Things get complicated when the gap is tight or even when the order between each candidate varies as and when the lifts. Each institute must take responsibility for waiting for routings to continue to refine or communicate the results to the media. With their experience in this area, institutes, such as Ipsos or Kantar, have created their own calculation tool.
8 pm: Publication of first results
At 8 pm, time of the closing of the last offices, the media can communicate the estimates of the final score in most municipalities whose voting places had closed at 7 pm. In larger cities where offices close at 8 pm, the feedback work begins only at that time. The results are distinguished throughout the evening until the final scores reveal in the night by the Ministry of the Interior.
During the day, polls are also realized, most of the time on the basis of online questionnaire. They are not used to make the official estimates, but to analyze the sociology of the vote.