An election like this one, with 80 days of campaigning, voting stretching over five weeks and seven phases, means there are people who know more than the rest of us about where the results are headed. They may even already know who has won, or is close to winning and who has lost. I am not referring to the guesswork that many of us do based on perception, but numbers.

Not because of anything underhanded, I should add, but merely because they have more access to data than the voters. Exit poll results are banned by the Election Commission till after the last vote is cast, meaning they cannot be published or broadcast before 5pm on Sunday, May 19. (The exact phrasing is between “the hour fixed for commencement of poll in the first phase and half an hour after the time fixed for close of poll for the last phase in all the states.” That’s clear enough.)

However, the exit polling is still being carried out. Meaning that there are agencies which have gone out and recorded data for four of the phases, and they have analysed it.

Exit polling is generally more accurate than opinion polling. It has gotten better in India over the years as agencies Indianise their craft (to eliminate, for instance, voter suspicion about how this information would be used by the questioning stranger, causing them to often withhold their answer or mislead). On December 7, The Times of India reported that of the six exit polls conducted after the Rajasthan elections, all six had more or less got the figures right. Five of them predicted a Congress win in what was a fairly tight race and the sixth had the BJP up by only two seats.

Madhya Pradesh, where the vote share was almost exactly equal between Congress and BJP, was more difficult to call but here also most got it right. Certainly, they got it more right than the opinion polling. A national sample size of 75,000 or so, which is around what most agencies go with for their national exit polls, costs around Rs 1.5 crore. This is quite a modest sum — it would be much more expensive to do it on this scale in Europe and the US — and there are several parties I can think of who would be interested in this data that has been recorded between April 11 and April 29.

The agencies have been commissioned by television networks, newspapers, political parties and business groups to come back with who is winning and where. The first four phases include most of UP, Bihar, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and West Bengal, and all of Andhra Pradesh, Maharashtra, Telangana, Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, Kerala and Gujarat. Of the total of 543 constituencies, 374 have already voted.

It is not an exaggeration to say that there are agencies that know who has won the election and they have informed the parties, groups and individuals who have commissioned them to get this data, even though it has not been published or broadcast.

The question is: how do we, the unknowing, learn something about the results in this excruciatingly long election season? I have been thinking about this and have the following things that may interest you as points of reference.

I named business interests earlier, and I include the stock market. It is inconceivable to me that those who make their living trading on its ups and downs would hesitate to spend Rs 1.5 crore for information that could be pure gold. The top five mutual funds in India manage assets of about Rs 15 lakh crore (which is $225 billion). They have without a doubt been looking at what sort of government they should anticipate. The interesting thing here is that the Sensex has been flat all of April, closing at 38,871 on April 1 and closing at 38,963 on May 3, perhaps meaning it is a very close election.

Of course, it is the case that the Sensex itself is just one indicator and a relatively minor one. All sorts of stocks will have gone up and down in this period because of access to information.

The second indicator is the messaging from political parties, which will be tweaking their campaign based on what they see as working.

The third one is subtle messaging from those who know but cannot publish officially. I mean, for instance, the Twitter accounts of editors, anchors and even pollsters putting out information disguised as punditry. The elections still have three phases to go, but the signs of who has won and who has lost are all around us if we are alert to them.