Binayfication strategy is not working – change or explode in flames on the way down

Binayfication is the strategy employed by VP Binay and the rest of the family on the current allegations and charges hounding them individually and collectively as a family. Binayfication is about ignoring and not answering the allegations and charges of corruption being revealed and multiplying at the committee hearings led by Senators Cayetano, Pimentel and Trillanes. It is about ignoring and not answering them and instead introducing new issues and points that are totally unrelated to the charges and allegations with the intent of diverting the attention of the people.

these survey results from both Pulse Asia and SWS says it all, quite emphatically how Binayfication has failed as a strategy:

sources : http://www.sws.org.ph/ and http://pulseasia.ph/

all the survey results, Pulse Asia’s trust and performance ratings and SWS satisfaction ratings of jojo binay as a vice president has plummeted in September 2014 from previous periods of June and March 2014. the changes from September to June are all dramatic and statistically significant – the drops are -15% points. comparing the September numbers to one more quarter before that, from March 2014, the drops are even more devastating, they increase from a middle double-digit number to now -20% in most cases.

not only that, the drops as the Pulse Asia survey shows are across the board, across all regions and across all socio-eco classes. in other words, the vote of disapproval is from everyone in all places in the country. that is massive decline in any survey, political or even in marketing.

that tells us whatever it is the Binay camp are doing, they are not working and is not helping the cause of VP Binay for his 2016 presidential aspirations. in marketing, actions and strategies are measured and judged by numbers, by results. the actual business numbers and results equivocally tell us whether they are working or not. numbers that go up simply say they are working and numbers that are down says they are not working. whatever the numbers are, you base your next step on those. good numbers says continue whatever you are doing while bad numbers says stop whatever you are doing and change course.

for the past weeks, all that the Binay camp have been doing is Binayfication. the numbers are out and what they are saying is that Binayfication is not working . the smart strategist will make a move to change strategies. but that does not seem to be what they will do. so far, all they have been doing is the same thing. doing the same thing will give the same results. if these initial results is the beginning of a trend, Binay is set to lose the 2016 election.

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credit goes to sargo for the term “Binayfication”. it is being used with permission. 

 

both SWS and Pulse Asia surveys hit 100% match with official senatoriables 2013 election Comelec results

there is no other way to describe it -both SWS and Pulse Asis senatoriables polls during the 2013 mid term election were impressive, both hit 100% in the list of senatoriables they had on their surveys compared to the top 12 on the final & official results from the Comelec.

SWS conducted their last survey for the senatoriables election May 2 to 3 and got these results compared to the actual and final Comelec results:

• 12 out of 12 in the poll came out as top 12 in the Comelec tally, 100% success rate
• 3 senatoriables, Escudero, K Pimentel and Honasan came in at exactly the ranking on the survey and the Comelec tally, a 25% match.
• 5 senatoriables, Legarda, AP Cayetano, N Binay, B Aquino and Trillanes came within 1 to 2 places off in the survey versus the final Comelec tally, a 42% match.
• adding the two numbers, 8 out of 12 or 67% came within a match to 2 places on the survey versus the Comelec tally
• only 4, Poe, S Angara, Ejercito and C Villar was off by more than 2 places from the final tally

Pulse Asia conducted its last survey for the senatoriables election on may 10 to 11. because of the nature of reporting and computation done by Pulse Asia on their poll results which were all expressed on a range, 11 out of 12 senatoriables matched the placements of the senatoriables to that of the Comelec tally. only 1 senatoriable, C. Villar was off.

the range means the Pulse Asia poll results were  showing a lot of ties or statistically insignificant differences from senatoriable to another.

what does this all mean?

it means SWS and Pulse Asia election polls are highly reliable and an excellent gauge of people’s sentiments on elections. there can be no better result than a 100% match rate and specially with a high number of matches coming in less than 2 places off.

that means the vetting of respondents done by the pollsters are excellent and are precisely representative of the voting population. it also means the random sampling done by these two polling agencies are to the point. most importantly, the sample size of 1,200 to 1,500 are good enough to be able to capture sentiments of voters on a national scale.

the above points, specially on the sample size have been the most questioned by non-believers of surveys, SWS and Pulse Asia in particular. not that the haters are able to present statistical arguments against the pollsters, but these have been incessantly raised by them. we have always said, those who raise them are those who are not winning in the polls thus having a skewed agenda. the excellent match up results proves the counter argument correct.

last point on what this means – it will be wise for election candidates in the future to subscribe and pay attention to the SWS and Pulse Asia election polls.

twitter followers of 2013 Senatoriables – how many are real, how many are fake?

we came across an interesting website on twitter the other day (courtesy of @Simply_Clinton) – twitter audit (http://www.twitteraudit.com/). the website analyses a twitter account’s followers and determines what portion are “real” followers and what is “fake”.

we assume “real” followers are other twitter accounts with individual humans behind them that follow a twitter account. they are acquired over time who follows an account based on a match on interest, point of view, tweets that are simply interesting or where to get information from.

“fake” followers are bots (internet robots) who are added to the list of followers just to add numbers to the followers list. the thinking is that, the more followers have or the greater the number of followers, the more popular the twitter user/account is. we have all heard of a twitter following contest of some sort between the likes of justin bieber and lady gaga for example. that is the whole idea behind it.

we are guessing someone having a bigger number of followers will feel important or encourage others to follow the person.

apparently, there are internet services from whom you can buy twitter followers. social media practitioners apparently do this all the time for their clients. when you hire a social media practitioner, adding or padding your follower list is one of the things they do for you.

with this in mind, we ran some 2013 senatoriables twitter accounts to find out what is the ratio of “real” vs “fake” twitter followers they have on their accounts.

we do not know if these politicians actually “bought” followers and we are not even giving an opinion on it. maybe they are all “real” followers and that the twitteraudit.com is wrong or giving us bad data or they have a large number of twitter followers whose accounts have become dormant for a long time. these things happen. and we really do not know how accurate or reliable twitteraudit.com is.

take these with a grain  salt, decide on your own what they mean.

for good measure, we also put here our own (@wawam) twitter audit and other politicians who are active on twitter. looking at the other audit results will give you a better gauge of what the data all mean for the rest.

   

head to head comparison SWS vs Pulse Asia February 2013 Senatoriables Polls

the good news is that the country has two polling companies doing a great job of capturing the sentiments of voters – SWS (social weather station) and Pulse Asia. it also adds to it that they tend to conduct the polls at about the same time. with the respondent criteria about the same and survey timing very close to each other, comparing the two results is a very good thing to do.

surveys give the people a view, scientific and objective, of what others think about candidates and issues. it can help others shape or confirm their own views. in this complex world of ours, more information is always better.

for candidates and handlers of the candidates, it can be more than informational, it can be very instructive. they can use the results to re-shape, change directions or strengthen their winning strategies or fix and avoid their losing strategies.

but that is very much dependent on the skill sets of the candidates and their handlers on analyzing and understanding surveys. that is the first step.

the second and the more important step is formulating new strategies and plans based on the survey analysis and conclusions.

we are providing here a first step analysis of the  survey results. there are a few more steps on analysis that needs to be done and more steps at formulating action steps in strategy change and plans formulation. but those are for another day.

in the meantime….

data sources: Pulse Asia & SWS

• Pulse Asia : http://pulseasia.ph/
• SWS : http://www.sws.org.ph/

also read (click) :

• dramatic gains for aquino & poe, dramatic drops for trillanes, zubiri & enrile – pulse asia february 2013 senatoriables poll
• dramatic drops for UNA & dramatic increases for Team PNoy in february SWS sentatoriables survey

dramatic gains for aquino & poe, dramatic drops for trillanes, zubiri & enrile – pulse asia february 2013 senatoriables poll

not much has changed among the top 3 ranking senatoriables, legarda, escudero and cayetano alan peter from previous poll.

for this february 2013 pulse asia 2013 senatoriables survey, 15 senatoriables are competing for the top 12 position. in order of highest to lowest ranks as follows:

1. legarda (Team PNoy)
2. escudero (Team PNoy)
3. cayetano alan peter (Team PNoy)
4. villar, cynthia (Team PNoy) 
5. ejercito (UNA)
6. aquino, bam (Team PNoy)
7. binay (UNA)
8. poe (Team PNoy)
9. pimentel (Team PNoy)
10. honasan (UNA)
11. enrile, jack (UNA)
12. trillanes (Team PNoy)
13. angara (Team PNoy)
14. zubiri (UNA)
15. gordon (UNA)

6 senatoriables  are battling for the last 3 positions, the 10th to the 12th, senatoriables honasan, enrile, trillanes, angara, zubiri and gordon who are all tied.

at the bottom among the candidates of the two major coalition parties, UNA and Team PNoy, are mitos magsaysay and tingting cojuangco  both from UNA. their rankings have not changed from previous.

among the 15 candidates fighting for the top 12 spots, 9 are from Team PNoy and 6 are from UNA.

among the top 9, only 2 are from UNA (binay and ejercito) while the rest are from Team PNoy. among the 6 who are battling for the last 3 spots, 4 are from UNA and only 2 are from Team PNoy.

with those rankings, if elections were held today, Team PNoy has a chance of gaining 9 out of the 12 seats at best or 7 out of 12 at worst, a clear majority of the seats.

Team PNoy has generally done very well in this survey.

source : https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B3b9qPFV1cRDNGJWVXpKN0ZhZU0/edit

dramatic increases in rank and rating were gained by aquino and poe, both by +9 places who are now tied at 4th place from previous survey at 13th place; and +11.8 percentage points and +11.2 percentage points, respectively.

3 senatoriables suffered dramatic losses in rank and rating, 1 from Team PNoy, trillanes and 2 from UNA, enrile and zubiri.  all three lost 5 places in the rankings although all three still came within the top 12.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

chief justice corona’s approval rating suffers a catastrophic meltdown – Pulse Asia Poll

source Pulse Asia : http://pulseasia.com.ph/pulseasia/story.asp?ID=748

• chief justice corona’s approval rating plunges to 14% from previous 38% and his disapproval rating took an upward sizzle from 24% to 58%. those can only be described as a catastrophic meltdown all due to the impeachment case t oust him being held at the senate. there is no other way to describe in approval rating  by more than  half  and a more than doubling of number of responding disapproving of corona.’s performance.
• results on corona in this poll is highly consistent with the other Pulse Asia that showed a high 47% of the respondent found corona guilty versus only a 5% of the respondents found him innocent of the charges filed at the impeachment court.
• this is the court of public opinion, not the impeachment court so many things can come into play on this resulting approval/disapproval rating of corona by the respondents.
• over at twitter, we had said corona should form his own professional Crisis Management Team very early during the impeachment case. we had called out for this need almost on the first day the case was filed at the house of representatives. we figured the prosecution team obviously had their own team operating prior to day 1 of the whole process. the actions and messages of the prosecution team was so well crafted and well planned that there was a strategy in play and that can only come from a professional team of PR practitioners or media managers.
•  the need for corona to have his own Crisis Management Team was not only necessary because of their adversary, but also this was obviously a very major development in the chief justice’s career. something as major as an impeachment case needed major efforts to protect his interests. the impeachment case was something very public, live tv coverage has been announced and that meant corona needed professionals to manage the media aspect of it.
• the need for a professional Crisis Management Team to handle corona’s affairs was highlighted when he decided to deliver a speech in front of the Supreme Court premises attacking President Noynoy Aquino. corona with that speech decided to be a politician and effectively declared a media war and opened the court of public opinion.  moves like that should not be done without careful thinking and professional handling.

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more on this next….

Pulse Asia’s Chief Justice Corona Trial Poll results – the people sees past through prosecution’s incompetence

source: http://pulseasia.com.ph/pulseasia/story.asp?ID=747

• we are surprised at the high number of 84% of the respondents following the developments of the impeachment rial of chief  justice corona. we thought it would not be this high. after all this is not the president of the country like the erap estrada impeachment, just the chief justice. the erap impeachment getting high numbers will not be a surprise but a chief justice impeachment is.
• a high number of those who follow the developments say tv is their media choice at 80%. that means many of the people are watching the live coverage of the impeachment trial. they are getting the developments first hand, seeing the drama unfold in front of their eyes.
• internet for some reason got a very low number – just 1%, we think this is mostly a function of low computer incidence and low internet usage among the poor who accounts for a large majority of the philippine population.
• radio coming in only at 12% is a shock. radio is the dominant media ownership in the country, almost 100% of homes have radio. for radio to be a non factor in medium choice is very surprising. this means tv has become a most important medium in the country. (the advertising industry need to retool some of theoir thinking on this one.)

• the defense was trying to make something out of their charge that the impeachment complaint was fast-tracked at the Hour Of Representatives. we really don’t understand why this is important and what it is for but they seem to be saying because it was railroaded at the house, the complaint is invalid, don’t ask us why because we can;t explain it.
• also we do not think it really matters, the fact is the senate has opened an impeachment court. whether it has been fast-tracked or not no longer matters.
• this table is a practically a split where respondents can’t decide whether it was fast-tracked or not at he HOR. the numbers are practically tied with 32% saying it was fast-tracked while 38% do not think it was fast-tracked.
• looks like the defense team has lost his battle.

this chart to us the most important findings of the poll – how people feel about the guilt or innocence of the the chief justice on the charges brought to him bu the HOR (House Of Representatives).

it is important to take note of this from the Pulse Asia website:

The survey fieldwork was conducted from February 26 to March 9, 2012 using face-to-face interviews. The following developments preoccupied Filipinos immediately prior to and during the conduct of the interviews for this survey: (1) the ongoing impeachment trial of Supreme Court Chief Justice Renato C. Corona* ; (2) the arraignment for electoral fraud of former President and incumbent Pampanga Representative Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo; (3) the death and destruction caused by a 6.9 intensity earthquake in the Visayas on 06 February 2012; (4) the commemoration of the 26th anniversary of EDSA People Power I; (5) the controversies involving a few presidential appointees; (6) the death of Negros Occidental Representative Ignacio Arroyo and the fight over his remains; and (7)  the increase in oil prices, fluctuating power rates, declining headline inflation rate, and the record-breaking performance of the Philippine Stock Exchange.

this survey was conducted while the prosecution was still presenting their witnesses and evidence to the court. the defense has not started any of their presentations yet.

• the significant difference in those who believe corona is guilty at 47% versus those who believe he is innocent at 5% is a very significant finding. that means at that point in time when the poll was taken, when the prosecution was still making their case, the people was seeing corona as guilty.
•  we were of the view that the prosecution team was screwing up big time.  we are not lawyers but we can tell they were doing a very bad job. the only time the prosecution did well was when neil tupas, the lead prosecutor delivered his opening speech during the trial. everything after that speech was horrible for the prosecution. he did well because he read a written speech.
• the corona trial became a sad telenovela of “what did the prosecution do wrong this time? the prosecution delivered – they seemed to have done something new that was wrong on a daily basis. we knew that as senator miriam defensor santiago and the presiding judge himself, senator juan ponce enrile  delivered their most impassioned speeches in the trial berating the prosecution team on their latest blunders, incompetence or errors, senator santiago didn;t even bother to sugar coat her words, she just said it in plain, actually elegant and biting english. wha?!
• over and beyond that thick muck of prosecution incompetence, the prosecution in reality was able to get past the court evidence and testimonies that to say the least corona needed to explain to the court and the country or evidence and testimony that can be used by the senator judges to convict corona.
• for the respondents to see through that thick muck of prosecution incompetence and find corona guilty to us is just short of being a miracle or brilliance on the part of the respondents.
• to be fair the incompetence the prosecution showed was not really on the main point of their existence in the impeachment court, but on the almost and everything  they did outside the court and before the impeachment court came into being.  the fact is they were able to get the court to accept testimony and evidence that the senator judges can use to convict corona.
• okay,  we stand corrected, the prosecution also showed incompetence during the trial as they were constantly berated by senators santiago and enrile on their lack of knowledge and skills in presenting evidence and testimony of their witnesses. in other words, the senator judges were saying the prosecution did not know how to properly conduct a trial. that of course was a surprise considering the prosecutors are lawyers who were elected congressmen in their districts. apparently, not all lawyers are created equal and these congressmen who are also lawyers were shortchanged on that aspect when God made them lawyers.
• does that mean the respondents were so brilliantly gifted that they were able to separate the garbage from the prosecution on their lawyering skills versus the evidence they were able to get the court accepted?
• there is no other explanation for it. it looks like the respondents know what a corrupt official is versus one that is not. or an impeachable chief  justice versus one who is not.
• we think the people are just so fed up with corrupt and incompetent government officials that it did not matter even if the messenger of the message is being faulted by santiago on a daily basis.

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more on this next….

bad news for mar roxas – both SWS and Pulse Asia exit polls show a Jejomar Binay win

the current COMELEC and GMA7 unofficial partial tally of votes put jejomar  binay and mar roxas to close to call with a spread of only 800T votes with binay leading but 6 million votes still uncounted. binay has claimed victory, saying only an electronic garci can change the outcome while roxas says he will win by a squeaker when the votes from visayas are counted, roxas’ bailiwick. both are saying these are based on reports from their supporters who are in the field.

however, both SWS and Pulse Asia exit polls point to a binay win with pulse asia giving it to binay with a 5.3% points margin. with a 1% sampling error, that puts binay a slight winner. SWS gives it to binay a 2.4% points margin.

roxas saying the visayas as his bailiwick is being confirmed by the pulse asia exit poll where he dominates with 54.7% versus binay’s 25.4%. however, binay dominates roxas almost with the same large margin in all other areas – NCR, Luzon and Mindanao. 

source: http://pulseasia.com.ph/pulseasia/story.asp?ID=720

source: http://www.sws.org.ph/

noynoy aquino – the teflon presidentiable, nothing sticks!

the 2010 election is probably one of the nastiest philippine presidential election in its history. not that philippine elections are known for intelligent debates on national issues, but noynoy aquino in particular have received the worst kinds of negative attacks.

there is a very long laundry list of negative and even personal attacks on noynoy aquino that started almost on the day after he announced his candidacy. almost all the attacks were personal – lack of achievements,  lack of experience, being a bachelor, being autistic,  his cigarette smoking, his hair or lack of it, his use of his parents credentials and  the most recent, the double fake psyche reports.

but none of it, not a single negative attack  got to stick to aquino. that makes aquino a teflon presidentiable.

aquino’s standing in the polls since the very start has not changed  – he has been the front runner. while his current rating may not be as high as what it was at the start, he continue to dominate the other presidentiables.  shrinkage from his going in rating is normal and expected. what is unusual and admirable is that he has maintained his front runner status from day one till now even though black propaganda against aquino was always there in various and new forms.

how was aquino able to survive such atttacks?

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this is next at The 2010 Presidentiables Blog….

SWS’ mahar mangahas answers richard gordon

it’s hard to believe richard gordon do not have an appreciation of surveys and he is that ignorant of it. he has been a politician for a long time and his previous job at the private sector (procter & gamble) must have given him a good dose of knowledge on it.

but he has taken SWS and Pulse Asia to court, so we can assume he does not know a lot of things. mahar mangahas of SWS gives him an answer, for his knowledge:

source: http://opinion.inquirer.net/inquireropinion/columns/view/20100430-267410/Ignorant-columnists-may-not-be-TROd

Social Climate
Ignorant columnists may not be TRO’d

by Mahar Mangahas
Philippine Daily Inquirer
First Posted 23:34:00 04/30/2010

ABOUT COLUMNISTS. EVERY THREE YEARS, IN the Philippines, comes a silly season when some columnists excel in misinforming the public about survey science. These are the ones who assert, for instance, that “a survey of only one or two thousand respondents cannot possibly represent many millions of voters.” Despite repeated demonstrations that a properly conducted sample survey is indeed representative of the whole population, they will not accept it, and would rather bask in their ignorance.

Now, is there a way for a columnist who propagates falsehoods to be legally suppressed? For instance, may professional statisticians petition a court for a Temporary Restraining Order (TRO) to stop a columnist from vilifying statistical research about voters’ preferences? The answer to this is NO.

A columnist has a constitutional right to display his ignorance, without prior restraint. This is because the right of free expression is a preferred right—“prior restraint” and “preferred right” being legal phrases.

The statisticians’ legal remedy for a columnist’s abuse of free speech would be to sue for damages afterwards. But they don’t bother, because a statistically-challenged columnist doesn’t fool the people who really count.

About Gordon’s complaint. Last week, Sen. Richard “Dick” Gordon asked a Regional Trial Court to issue a TRO against Social Weather Stations and another survey entity, to desist from conducting and publishing their election surveys, which he called “false, inaccurate and flawed,” causing him “grave and irreparable injury.”

Gordon’s suit is ridiculously sloppy. Above all, it is ignorant of the Supreme Court’s affirmation that election surveys are constitutionally protected (see my April 17 column). In SWS v. Comelec (G.R. 147571, May 5, 2001), the Court nullified the section of the 2001 Fair Election Act that attempted to ban publication of election surveys. It ruled that such a ban “imposes a prior restraint on the freedom of expression” and forms “a direct and total suppression of a category of expression” during the elections.

Gordon claims that “surveys issued by the defendants … showed him only at the 29th spot,” and yet he won as senator in 2004. Actually, the SWS surveys of the 2004 senatorial race had him as 14th in Jan. 18-22, tied for 16th on Feb. 17-25, 14th on March 21-29, tied for 8th on April 10-17, and tied for 9th (with 29 percent of the vote) on May 1-4. It looks like 29 percent was misread as 29th place. Thus he was already in the winning circle in the last two SWS pre-election surveys.

Gordon’s complaints about methodology are false. (1) My column of March 6, 2010 reported that SWS received two awards from the Gallup World Poll for excellence in field methodology, among all of Gallup’s Asian field providers. (2) Face-to-face interviewing, which we always do, and which Gordon thinks “outmoded,” is part of Gallup’s job order to SWS. (3) We agree with Gordon that sampling should be done by probability, and not by quota. Apparently he doesn’t know that SWS always does the former, and never does the latter.

Gordon calls it “highly improbable” that SWS did two national surveys over as short a period as March 19-30, 2010. Actually, SWS did eight national surveys, not all about elections, over January-April 2010, plus several local surveys.

Gordon alleges that, last April 14, an unidentified SWS pollster in Cebu asked a respondent to choose between only two presidential candidates, instead of among 10. Comments: (1) SWS had no election survey in Cebu on that date; (2) all SWS interviewers have ID cards—tell us her name so that we can check; (3) the published SWS election surveys always feature the 10 candidates; (4) in any case, it is legitimate for anyone to inquire how a voter would choose between two candidates.

Gordon’s claim that SWS fails to disclose its sponsors is false. Check the website, http://www.sws. org.ph. The SWS Survey Data Library is open to the public. Its staff helps visitors, short of serving as research assistants. The library fee is affordable even to students. Users should come personally, and not expect their technical questions to be answered by mail.

Gordon’s citations of survey errors in past elections are very few; they are the exceptions that prove the rule, like the failure of US pollsters to predict Truman’s win over Dewey in 1948, which he cites as though it was SWS’ fault too. My 2009 paper, “The challenge of election surveys in the Philippines,” summarizes our election survey record; see our website. The error of the 2004 exit poll in Metro Manila was investigated by an independent group of scientists, and no fraudulence was found; see their report on the website.

Gordon’s claim that “there are no associations of professional pollsters and polling firms which regulate, control, and sanction defendants … for their violation of the code of professional ethics …” is false. Seems he hasn’t heard of the Marketing and Opinion Research Society of the Philippines (MORES), founded in 1977. Both MORES and the World Association for Public Opinion Research (WAPOR), to which key SWS staff members belong, have Codes of Ethics. Last Wednesday, the MORES board of directors issued a press statement denouncing Gordon’s petition for striking at the heart of our democratic process.

If the SWS election surveys were not true, accurate, and best-quality, I wonder if Gordon would still be interested in a TRO. Maybe he would just grant us the same freedom of speech that we allow to ignorant columnists.

april 2010 pulse asia survey for senators – awareness matters

the april 2010 results of asia pulse’s poll for senators is is a lesson in advertising & marketing 101 – (brand) awareness is the number one issue and achieving it is the first goal of any election campaign.

except for 2, the rest of  the first 14 candidates who have the possibility of entering the top 12 in this election  have high awareness, at least an  80%+ level and most of  them are at the 90%+ level.  the two, biazon and guingona have 52% and 74% respectively.

on the other hand, the rest of the senatorial candidates below the top 14 have very low awareness, many of them below 30%.

awareness is the most basic requirement of any brand in any market and that includes political elections. if the voters do not know you or are not aware of you, how can they prefer or vote for you? after awareness is preference.

the goal of advertising are those things – build awareness and build preference. while not all of the top 14 have tv ads. almost all of them are already known by the voters.

for those wanting to win this election, they will need to fix these two components and advertising is the answer. however, with just a few days till election time, achieving anything even with advertising might be too difficult.  

Pulse Asia April 2010 Presidentiables Poll : estrada ties villar at 2nd, aquino widens lead

The survey fieldwork was conducted from April 23 to 25, 2010 using face-to-face interviews. Key developments in April 2010 include the following: (1) defections from the Lakas-Kampi Christian Muslim Democrats (CMD) mostly to the Nacionalista Party (NP) and the Liberal Party (LP); (2) election-related issues such as the purchase of ultraviolet lamps (UV) because the UV readers of the Precinct Count Optical Scan (PCOS) machines were unable to read the UV markings on the ballots, the scrapping of the P 700 million contract for the purchase of ballot secrecy folders, and the re-bidding of the contract for the purchase of indelible ink; (3) completion of the printing of ballots for the May 2010 elections; (4) various incidents of election-related violence across the country; (5) Senator Francis G. Escudero’s endorsement of Senator Benigno Simeon C. Aquino III for president and Makati City Mayor Jejomar C. Binay for vice-president; (6) accusations made by former President Joseph E. Estrada and Senate President Juan Ponce Enrile against Senator Manuel B. Villar, Jr. that while serving as Senate President in 2007, Senator Villar used his position to pressure the Philippine Stock Exchange (PSE) to decide in his favor on a matter concerning the public offering of his real estate company’s shares; (7) Senator Richard J. Gordon’s filing of charges against two survey groups; (8) petitions from various sectors for a parallel manual count of votes; (9) the Supreme Court’s final ruling allowing President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo to appoint the next chief justice (but not the next Sandiganbayan Justice); (10) calls for the resignation and disbarment of Department of Justice (DOJ) Acting Secretary Alberto Agra following his decision to clear two key suspects in the Maguindanao massacre; and (11) increase in power rates despite rotating brownouts in Metro Manila and other parts of the country.

http://pulseasia.com.ph/pulseasia/story.asp?ID=716