The season of unreliable polls has started in Brazil

Over the past couple of years, Brazil has witnessed a massive surge in the number of institutes publishing electoral polls. For years, the prohibitive costs of conducting in-person interviews across a vast territory created a de facto duopoly between major pollsters Datafolha and Ibope, but their grasp on the segment has been broken by more affordable online and telephone survey methods.

Furthermore, there are more companies venturing into the political arena which are keen on commissioning polls — especially from the financial sector. While some of these surveys have proven to be reliable, editor Euan Marshall showed the negative effects of that trend back in 2018 — as it gives some investors early access to information that could influence the markets. 

Indeed, there are even more nefarious aspects of the profusion of electoral polls in Brazil: the rise of surveys intended not to provide an accurate picture of the political landscape, but instead to tilt the electoral scales.

One such poll made headlines in the northern state of Amazonas, where the obscure CM7 institute placed President Jair Bolsonaro 17 points ahead of former President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva among voters in the state. 

The sheer discrepancy between the results and those of other institutions...