An opinion poll which gave incumbent Turkish Cypriot leader Ersin Tatar a lead of a little more than three per cent over his opposition-backed challenger Tufan Erhurman ahead of October 19’s Turkish Cypriot leadership election was on Tuesday declared “misleading” by the Turkish Cypriot media ethics board.

The poll had been conducted by a company by the name of Public Global for newspaper Kibris, and the media ethics board said that “while the report included information such as its sample size, data collection method, and margin of error, it was found to be lacking in key elements supporting the reliability of the study”.

Those “key elements”, it said, included “methodological details of the survey”, such as when the fieldwork was done, the sampling technique used, and the method of assessing undecided voters.

It also pointed out that Public Global is not listed as a company on the north’s companies’ register, and its existence “could not be verified through publicly available official records, a website, contact information, past research samples, or academic references”.

“The data obtained indicate that the survey … does not meet the criteria of verifiability and auditability. In this context, reporting data allegedly produced by an organisation of which the existence cannot be confirmed is problematic,” it said.

It also criticised Kibris for publishing the poll, saying that “the fact that the news report was published on the eve of the election process and that information ensuring transparency regarding the source of the data was not provided to the public raises suspicions that the content of the publication may be manipulative”.

The poll had been released just days after a separate poll released by CMIRS gave Erhurman a lead of just shy of 10 per cent.

Erhurman advocates for a return to negotiations based on a federal solution to the Cyprus problem, while Tatar has insisted on the continuation of his policy of pursuing a two-state solution.