Why Spain's CIS polling institute produces those results

In El Debate, Ramón Pérez-Maura argues that the results of Spain's CIS polling institute, which give the PSOE a lead of up to twelve points over the second-placed party, cannot be explained by technical error and point to a strategy to shield the Government from accusations of electoral fraud. Private pollsters, according to the article, agree with one another and place the results far from those of the CIS.

The **El Debate** columnist **Ramón Pérez-Maura** published an article on 16 October 2026 asking why the Centro de Investigaciones Sociológicas (Spain's official sociological research institute) publishes results so far removed from what private pollsters are announcing. His thesis is uncomfortable: this is not a matter of statistical kitchen-sink errors, but a lie fabricated with a specific purpose. When a poll grants a twelve-point lead over the runner-up, he argues, it is not measuring a trend: it is guaranteeing a victory.

## The gap between the CIS and private pollsters

Pérez-Maura points out that it is impossible for every polling institute to be wrong except one. The private firms, he stresses, offer results very similar to each other and very far from those of the CIS. That agreement among competitors who share neither methodology nor clients is, for the author, the first warning sign.

The article also recalls that after the 2023 elections some people came out saying the CIS was the only one that got it right. Pérez-Maura calls that false: the CIS said the **PSOE** would win the election and the **PP** won, taking the most votes. If that counts as getting it right, he writes, the bar is low.

His conclusion is that technicalities about raw results or statistical kitchen-sink adjustments explain nothing. In his view, applying those terms to justify the current polls is a failure to understand what this is all about.

## The fraud hypothesis and the role of the CIS

For Pérez-Maura, only one explanation fits an apparently absurd result: covering up electoral fraud. Polls, he admits, cannot detect fraud on their own. They only record the opinion expressed by voters, and that opinion has been recorded with considerable unanimity by private pollsters.

If the CIS result is the antithesis of what those firms are announcing, he reasons, how can **Pedro Sánchez** refute the fraud accusations? Quite simply: by saying the result was already anticipated by the CIS, which is the best and far ahead of the private institutes. The poll would thus serve as an argumentative shield.

The author adds that the CIS's professional fruta is already badly damaged and that publishing an apparently absurd poll makes it worse. If those results have been published, he writes, it is because work is being done in the shadows, not in the public square, to bring them about.

## The precedent of the grandchildren law and mobile-phone voting

The article mentions the fraud that, according to the author, was attempted through the grandchildren law (a law granting Spanish citizenship to grandchildren of Spanish exiles) and voting with mobile device identification. **Isabel Durán** has been revealing it in **El Debate**, and Pérez-Maura believes the newspaper is doing a great service to democracy.

The author expresses his hope that the **Junta Electoral Central** (Spain's central electoral board), which in his view is still an independent body on which the Government has not yet managed to get its claws, manages to defend the integrity of the electoral process.

Pérez-Maura closes with a warning: if talk of possible fraud in the vote is happening at this stage, it is because there are signs that the person governing is the one who could perpetrate it. Because, he concludes, they are willing to do anything.