Cade opens investigation against research institutes

The president of CADE (Administrative Council for Economic Defense), Alexandre Cordeiro, ordered this Thursday (13) the opening of an investigation against the research institutes.

In a letter sent to the general superintendent of CADE, Alexandre Barreto, Cordeiro, who is linked to the Minister of the Civil House of the Jair Bolsonaro government, Ciro Nogueira, states that the institutes may have acted as a cartel to “manipulate” the elections.

To determine the opening of the inquiry, the chairman of the board considers only the differences in the numbers of the polls of intention to vote in the days before the election and the result of the first round.

He says it is “absolutely unlikely” that several independent research institutes will make what he says is the same sampling error.

“The discrepancy between research and results is so great that there are indications that the errors are not random but intentional through an orchestrated action by research institutes in the form of a cartel to jointly manipulate the market and, ultimately, instance, the elections”, said Cordeiro.

“Therefore, I carried out some preliminary analyzes of the probability of the result and of the independence of the actions of the institutes in the production of electoral research in the first round of the electoral dispute for the Presidency of the Republic. an investigation by the antitrust authority”, he adds.

The inquiry opened at Cade will investigate the institutes Ipec, Datafolha and Ipespe for “infringement of the economic order”, according to the official letter.

In the document, Cordeiro also says that the fact that the three institutes show similar results “raises suspicion about the independence” of the companies.

“In the case in question, there are indications that competing research institutes may be acting in collusion or at least exchanging sensitive information, conducts that can be framed in the administrative types defined as cartel, induction of uniform business conduct and/or exchange of sensitive information.”

The letter was included in CADE’s SEI (Electronic and Information System) at 1:21 pm this Thursday. The document, however, was amended at 16:07. The latest version only adds the colors green and yellow in the tables, without explaining what the colored numbers are supposed to highlight.

Alexandre Cordeiro was Ciro Nogueira’s chief of staff and was chosen by Bolsonaro to assume the presidency of Cade by appointment of the minister. Ciro is one of the most influential politicians in the Bolsonaro government. Since the end of the first round, he has advocated a boycott of research institutes.

In Congress, allies of President Jair Bolsonaro (PL) have also made an offensive to try to discredit the institutes with arguments that ignore characteristics of electoral polls.

The thesis defended by the political group led by the president of the Chamber, Arthur Lira (PP-AL), is that institutes must get the results of the elections right, disregarding that electoral polls measure the voter’s declaration or intention on the day of the poll — not the actual vote cast. in the lawsuit.

This week, ABEP (Brazilian Association of Research Companies) requested access to the inquiry made by the Ministry of Justice related to electoral polls.

The association that represents companies in the sector took the measure after the Bolsonaro government’s portfolio sent the Federal Police a request to open an investigation into the performance of electoral research institutes in this year’s election.

The purpose of requesting access, according to Abep, is to follow the steps and collaborate with the clarification of any question about the activities of its members and associates.

Last week, the government leader in the Chamber, deputy Ricardo Barros (PP-PR), presented a bill to criminalize the publication of polls, in the 15 days before the election, that do not get the result of the election right. The sentence, according to the text, will be four to ten years in prison.

With the siege against the institutes, Datafolha clarified that it is not the objective of electoral polls to anticipate the result of the election.

“Each survey is a photograph of a certain moment. The final result is only in the urn”, said Luciana Chong, director of Datafolha, earlier this month.

It refutes the thesis that there was some kind of methodological error. For Chong, it is quite likely that in the hours before the elections a useful pro-Bolsonaro vote emerged from voters who previously declared a preference for Simone Tebet (MDB) and, mainly, for Ciro Gomes (PDT). The fear that Lula would be elected in the 1st round may, according to her, have contributed to this behavior.

“Electoral polls measure the intention to vote at the moment they are carried out. When carried out continuously throughout the electoral process, they are capable of pointing out trends, but they are not predictors capable of predicting the exact number of votes that each candidate will have”, he said. the direction of Ipec, in a note also at the beginning of October.