The Problem With Exit Polls in Indian Elections The results of elections in five states will be announced Tuesday. In Uttar Pradesh, India's largest state, exit polls released over the weekend indicate that the party of the current chief minister, Mayawati, is headed for certain defeat. The incumbents in the other four states - Punjab, Uttarakhand, Goa and Manipur - are also expected to suffer defeats or lose seats. But can we rely on these exit polls? In 2007, Ms. Mayawati, who uses only one name, led the Bahujan Samaj Party to a decisive and historic victory, even though none of the exit polls predicted that she would win. The party won 205 seats in the 403-member state legislature, the first time any single party had won a clear majority in 18 years. Ms. Mayawati, whose core supporters are Dalits, the lower-caste Hindus once known as untouchables, won even though she and her party were aloof and seemingly uninterested in normal electioneering. She did not hold news conferences, issue statements or offer an election manifesto, nor did she do so this year. Most of the exit polls indicate that her party's representation in the assembly will be reduced by about half. Predicting elections in Uttar Pradesh, which has 200 million people, is never easy. Several parties contest each seat, and the population of each constituency is often divided among several castes, religions and socio-economic classes. Moreover, many Dalits refuse to speak to pollsters, making it hard to gauge their intentions. Those problems are compounded by the fact that India uses a "first-past-the-post" system in which candidates that receive the most votes win even if they do not secure a majority of all votes cast in the race. "It is a nightmare if there is a multi-cornered contest as in U.P.," Yogendra Yadav, a respected Indian political analyst and pollster, told me in an e-mail message. Doing opinion polls in India is difficult because it is hard to do a strictly random selection of respondents and because telephonic surveys do not work. Mr. Yadav, who is a senior fellow at Center for the Study of Developing Societies in New Delhi, said that in 2007 exit polls did a decent job of predicting what percentage of all voters in the state would pick Ms. Mayawati's party. But they failed to predict how many seats she would win, a trickier task that requires more detailed, constituency-level polling data, he said. If Ms. Mayawati does indeed lose, it will likely be for a handful of reasons. She has, by and large, been inaccessible to members of her party, journalists and government officials, to say nothing of average residents. There are widespread allegations about corruption in her government, an impression she tried to dispel before the election by firing ministers who had been accused of taking bribes. She has a tendency to transfer government officials frequently from one post or one location to another, making it hard for them to accomplish anything meaningful before they are forced to pack up and move. She has also struggled to attract investment to Uttar Pradesh. The state's economy grew at an average of just 6.6 percent a year in the three fiscal years after Ms. Mayawati took over, far slower than other nearby states like Bihar (10.3 percent), Haryana (9.6 percent) and Uttarakhand (12 percent). Most of the exit polls in U.P. indicate that the Samajwadi Party, which governed the state before Ms. Mayawati came to power in 2007, is heading for a victory and may win close to half of the seats in the assembly. In Punjab, the polls have Congress slightly ahead of the governing coalition of Shiromani Akali Dal and the Bharatiya Janata Party, India's biggest opposition party at the national level. The polls also show a close race between Congress and the B.J.P. in Uttarakhand, which was once part of Uttar Pradesh. In Goa, a state currently ruled by Congress, exit polls suggest that no party will win a majority which could open the door for a coalition government. And in Manipur, the polls suggest the incumbent, Congress, will lose some seats but retain enough to return to power.