Election Polling Isn’t Supposed to be Helpful

by Jared

May 6, 2009 at 10:27 am
Tagged: ,

Kennedy Stewart is an SFU Public Policy professor: I’d classify him as a sociologist of politics. He has a model that takes province-wide poll numbers and converts them into seats. The Tyee has an interesting little interview with him where he explains where polls come from:

The reason why pollsters release results during elections is to demonstrate their accuracy so they can sell polling services to private/government firms after the election. Elections are a perfect way to demonstrate polling accuracy as projections can be checked against actual Election Day results.

Economic theory says that should cause polls to converge because it’s safer to compete on cost or service. Of course a market this small is bound to be full of fail, so instead we have polling companies competing on methodology. The punchline to this is that the Election Prediction Project has horrible methodology but generally does a pretty accurate job.

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  1. Don

    on May 6, 2009 at 10:34 am

    How is the STV referendum shaping up?

    You’ve probably seen this Google Maps map from the CBC where you can turn the proposed STV riding boundaries and the current 2009 provincial riding boundaries on and off.

  2. Jared

    on May 6, 2009 at 10:49 am

    All the polling done for STV that I’m aware of is push-polling, so the results aren’t useful.

  3. Don

    on May 6, 2009 at 1:40 pm

    All the polling done for STV that I’m aware of is push-polling, so the results aren’t useful.

    Well, I want to know: would you be more likely or less likely to vote for STV if you knew that it had fathered an illegitimate black child?