Congress Leader and MP Shashi Tharoor took to Twitter on Sunday, 19 May, to publicly deny the exit poll results as the seventh and final phase of the 2019 Lok Sabha Elections ended. The results overwhelmingly favoured the incumbent National Democratic Alliance (NDA), helmed by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).
Tharoor pointed to the fact that the exit poll predictions for the Australian elections, held a day prior, on Saturday, 18 May, had been vastly incorrect as well. The left-leaning Labor Party was expected to win, but the incumbent Liberal-National alliance came back for another term.
He also put up an infographic of a comparison between exit poll predictions and the official results from 1998 through 2014, presumably to highlight the discrepancies between the two.
Before that, he had retweeted a Congress volunteer’s tweet in which she asked people to keep in mind the 2004 re-election and how the INC had won despite most exit polls predicting a comfortable win for the Vajpayee-led BJP.
On 19 May, most exit poll conductors, including CVoter, ABP-Nielsen and India Today-MyAxis had predicted that the NDA will win the election with seats ranging from 242 (NewsX) to 350 (Chanakya).
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