Wednesday, 13 November 2002

On election day - November 15, 2002 - Zapera and Yahoo! will present an online exit poll live on the internet. Results will be updated every 3 minutes and displayed on Yahoo!s Swedish site.

The exit poll is a political opinion poll, but with the advantage that it polls respondents who already have voted (and not what they intend to vote). Between 1500 and 3000 Swedes are expected to take part in the exit poll.

"We expect to be able to provide an accurate estimate of the election at around 3pm," says Johanna Fyrbjörk, Senior Consultant at Zapera.

"Internet based opinion polls have been conducted in several countries around the world. In the last elections in the US they have been as accurate as traditional polling methods," says Johanna Fyrbjörk. "But as far as we know, we are still the only research company that conducts political opinion polls where the results are presented live to the world."

This will be the second online exit poll that Zapera conducts. The first was carried out last year in connection with the Danish elections. The Danish exit poll was as accurate as two traditional exit polls that were conducted and had an average deviation of less than 1% across all parties.

Participants in the Swedish exit poll will be members of Zapera's Swedish pre-recruited online panel. It will not be possible for people to "walk on" to the poll and each respondent will only be allowed to answer once. Results will be instantly post-stratified using a proprietary weighting algorithm.

Results will be displayed on the following address: http://se.news.yahoo.com/e/exitpoll.html