In the aftermath of Brazil’s first round of general elections on Sunday, major polling institutes were lambasted for vastly underestimating the support of incumbent far-right President Jair Bolsonaro, who managed to force the presidential race to a runoff on October 30. But pollsters have been up against it this year, being unable to rely on outdated official statistics to carry out accurate sampling — in fact, the country has not carried out a national census for 12 years.
On August 1, the Brazilian Geography and Statistics Institute (IBGE) finally got underway collecting data for the country’s census, delayed for…