An influential prediction market said yesterday that its presidential election index had been tampered with, resulting in skewed numbers favoring President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) over his Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) opponent Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文).
Following a statement by the Exchange of Future Events — the largest prediction market exchange in Taiwan, which is partly run by National Chengchi University — that its operations appeared to have been manipulated, the DPP said online users who were ostensibly Ma supporters had engineered a rollercoaster drop in support for Tsai over the past week.
The speculative market appeared to have since fixed the problem and by yesterday, the market showed Tsai trailing by about 2 percent — a marked increase from Sunday, when the disparity reached almost 20 percent.
On the market, “traders” can “buy” and “sell” virtual tenders on future events that operators claim accurately reflect the likelihood of an event taking place.
However, the open design of the exchange has left it vulnerable to attempts to manipulate individual results, something that has often been reported by the media.
The exchange said it had discovered large numbers of users attempting to “hype up” the election exchange index.
“Between June 17 and June 23, 1,419 users signed up, with 1,310 [92 percent] placing orders on the presidential election exchange. These accounts represented 75 percent of all sell orders and 15 percent of buy orders for Tsai. Conversely, they accounted for 79 percent of sell orders and 86 percent of buy orders for Ma,” the exchange said in a press release.
“It’s clear that these users seriously weakened Tsai’s prediction exchange and led to a small increase in Ma’s prediction exchange,” it said, adding that the exchange would start to require cellphone verification for future registrations.
Tsai was leading the president on the speculative exchange before Saturday last week, when the numbers began to show signs of manipulation.
Reacting to the news, politicians from both parties traded barbs on the matter, with a DPP official accusing Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) supporters of seeking to undermine the market.
DPP spokesperson Chen Chi-mai (陳其邁) pointed to online posts in forums frequented by KMT supporters asking supporters to -engineer Ma’s lead by selling Tsai orders and buying prediction orders for the president.
Most of the posts started on June 13, he said.
“Many of these supporters belong to ‘Young KMT’ groups,” Chen said. “These Ma fans are deliberately targeting and manipulating the speculative exchange through methods that the KMT should speak out against.”
Ma’s campaign office denied manipulating the numbers.
“It’s normal for polls from different organizations to show different results and we’ve never questioned the Prediction Market Center’s polls or claimed its numbers were the result of manipulation from the DPP,” Ma campaign office spokesperson Lee Chia-fei (李佳霏) said.
Lee said Ma’s support rate had fallen behind Tsai’s on countless occasions in previous polls by the center, but the KMT never accused the DPP of manipulating the results.
“The poll results are just for reference, what is more important is to present our policies more clearly and win the trust of voters with solid performances,” she said.
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