kassiope.org

I regularly blog on kassiope.org on various topics surrounding political polling and psephology. The general public has a number of misconceptions about political polling, including an overestimation of it’s abilities coupled with a general mistrust of it’s case by case predictions. This can be summarized as the belief that experts can perfectly predict electoral outcomes, but they are presenting pusposefully misleading polls to the general public so as to influence voting decisions. At the core of such beliefs is a lack of education in fundamental topics surrounding the uncertainty of statistical measurements. With various analyses of various degrees of depth and sophistication I try to assess and explain the true capabilities of current political polling (mainly in Greece), as well as discover cases where pollsters are misleading on purpose.

(the general public believes that) experts can perfectly predict electoral outcomes, but they are presenting pusposefully misleading polls so as to influence voting decisions

Psephology is the “quantitative analysis of elections and balloting” and goes beyond standard political poling. It can include any number of ML techniques, and attempts to predict elections earlier, more accurately, at more frequent intervals, or more cheaply than standard polling.

Kassiope.org includes a polling aggregator that 1) makes more robust estimates of voting intentions 2) allows to detect pollsters that systematically over or underestimate the polling numbers of a political party. Other more complex analyses include regressing voting intentions solely from macroeconomic data.