LETTER: We find what we look for

I wonder if columnist Jonny Steinberg does indeed care to eat humble pie? (“Devil is in the details in divisive predictions about election”, April 19).

A reminder that what you look for, you will find. In this case, it was apparently “white pollsters using their hard skills to skew the data to back the white party? That’s supposed to be bullsh*t sprouted by Jacob Zuma and Julius Malema. It isn’t meant to be true”.

Instead, what seems to have actually been true was the polls. I suggest Mr Steinberg has been outside SA for too long, not realising that the regulations and approaches of developed countries may not work here. For a country that he touts as having highly regulated polling, UK political polls have come to be taken with a pinch of salt, most visibly with Brexit before that.

Frankly, if I were running a research house/polling company and I’d managed to crack a formula for relatively accurately predicting SA elections among all the peculiarities and nuances in SA, I’d keep the methodology as secret as KFC keeps its 11 herbs and spices.

Stephanie Venter
Durban

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