Elsewhere in the world, election surveys are held against the light, and assessed based on where it is done, whose bailiwick(s) it chooses to survey, and how the survey is conducted.
In the Philippines, it is the media enterprises like ABS-CBN and Rappler that commission or do their own surveys, justifying the practice instead of questioning it.
Which might be why what we’ve gotten from our survey bigwigs is a whole lot of arrogance, too, much like matuwid-na-daan. Criticized for the SWS surveys swaying public opinion in 2010, Mahar Mangahas dared tell critics: “Do your own polls,” after also asserting that polls do not condition the minds of the public. (GMANetwork.com, Mar. 16, 2010)
Ninez Cacho-Olivarez writes about how SWS’s mobile survey is manipulated, “hardly scientific, since cellphones with free SIMs and free Internet have been handed to a selected base of 1,200 respondents spread nationwide and used for an immediate vote of respondents in any issue of the day.” (The Daily Tribune, Mar. 30, 2016)
It gets worse. According to the SWS website (Mar, 22, 2016), these respondents are part of a project that started on March 20 and will last until the end of May. So it seems this is a fixed set of respondents for the duration of three months; it is presumed that each respondent is the one answering the survey questions sent to them as text messages. And for whatever reason, respondents are given a good five hours to answer questions (questions are sent at 7:00 am, answers are accepted until 12 nn).
Oh and the best part? “After participating in the project up to the end of May, the members of the panel may keep the mobile phones.”