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A BRIEF POST MORTEM ON POLLING DURING THE ONTARIO 2011 ELECTION – October 7, 2011

[OTTAWA – October 7, 2011] – Ontario’s 2011 election was exciting and offered a number of surprises and we at EKOS are pleased that not only did we accurately project the popular vote, we believe we did a good job in charting the direction of the election. For instance, we were the first to call a Liberal victory in our September 27th release.

We learned a number of important lessons from the May 2nd federal election and we have invested a great deal of time and resources into tweaking our model to more accurately reflect the varying voter turnout rates among the different demographic subgroups. In the end, we moved from sitting in the same ballpark as the election results to effectively nailing them.

In our final poll (released the evening before the election), we predicted a Liberal majority government, though we observed a last-minute shift to the Progressive Conservative Party and cautioned that the final outcome was far from certain. The end result of the election was a Liberal minority, just one seat shy of a majority.

While we ultimately missed the minority call (albeit by one seat), we were spot on with the popular vote for each the two front runners and we projected the NDP to within two percentage points of the actual results. We missed the Green Party by just over this margin (5.2 per cent, compared to actual result of 3.0 per cent), though given the that party’s constituency was made up almost exclusively of younger voters who are the least likely to vote, this was not entirely unexpected.

Generally, we believe that our industry acquitted itself well in this campaign. We applaud all of those who ran and congratulate the victors. We would also like to thank the thousands of Ontarians who generously gave us their time and views.

Click here for the full report: Post Mortem (October 7, 2011)

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