A few hours before the end of the official campaign, Friday April 8, Eric Zemmour chose Telegram to make a last call to his voters, in the form of a voice message. “I have information to give you: I have in my possession the real polls, those of the Qotmii application, which nobody talks about and which give me the second round against Emmanuel Macron. (…) Don’t get robbed of this election, don’t believe what the media tells you.”says the former journalist in this short recording.
This is not the first time that the far-right candidate or his supporters have insisted that the polls are false and that the Qotmii application, published by the Canadian company of the same name, is much more realistic: it places Eric Zemmour in second position in its “house” ranking. Earlier today, an SMS was sent to many French phones. It encourages its recipients to visit the 2022sondages.fr site, managed by Eric Zemmour’s campaign team, which includes the results of Qotmii and encourages them to be shared widely.
Qotmii is not a polling institute: it is a data analysis company that measures “electoral potential”based mainly on the « buzz » and online activity around candidates. Its exact methodology is not public, and contrary to claims relayed by supporters of Reconquest!, it failed, in 2017, to predict the results of the vote – this tool was at the time published by another company, Filteris , “sister” of Qotmii. Five years ago, the activists of François Fillon, left behind in the polls, also relied heavily on this big data service during their campaign.
The CNCCEP calls for “not relaying” the indicator
“Rankings such as this cannot in any way be qualified as polls. (…) provided that they do not constitute statistical surveys by questioning a sample and that they do not measure a voting intention., noted the National Commission for the Control of the Electoral Campaign for the Presidential Election and the Polling Commission in a joint press release, released Friday evening. The two independent authorities, responsible for monitoring the election in conjunction with the Constitutional Council, “call for the greatest caution on such messages, which may constitute misleading information” and recommend to “media, platforms, social networks and individuals not to relay them”.
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