Monday, September 3, 2012

The Competition

This blog has 3 major competitors in this Quebec election projection season.

http://www.threehundredeight.com/
Three Hundred Eight is the most well known. Their track record is a bit shaky at times, being further off the mark federally in 2011 than any other major projection website. It is run by Eric Grenier. I've mentioned it before, but at one point, I wanted to merge this website with his, as, I thought his website name was stellar and would attract visitors, but after some thought, we both agreed it would be a bad idea. Then I came up with riding by riding!

http://electionsqc.com/
A new website that looks made specifically for this Quebec election. Professionally done and with many visual options, there is little past history to go on. This website however uses the correct methodology pioneered by myself and this website, the "Ratio" method. In his own words:
La variation d’un parti est répartie également à 50%, et en proportion du nombre de votes reçus dans la circonscription à 50%. Par exemple, si QS passe de 3,8% à l’élection à 8,7% dans les sondages, cela fait un écart de 4,9%. Tous les candidats QS monteront donc de 2,45%. Ensuite, comme cela représente une augmentation de 129%, tous les candidats augmentent de 64,5% par rapport à la dernière élection. Dans une circonscription où ils avaient obtenu 1% des voix, ils obtiendront 3,99% des voix (1+2,45+0,645). Dans une circonscription où ils avaient obtenu 10%, ils obtiendront 18,90% (10+2,45+6,45).
I am very very happy to see other projectionists using the ratio method!

This website was a minor player in the 2011 campaign, not garnering much attention until the end, when his projections were pretty damn close to being accurate. With an excellent mastery of English and French, the webmaster Bryan Breguet could be a forced to be dealt with. The main problem appears to be a faulty methodology, based on "uniform swing" - a method proven not to work in Canadian elections. 


I have no problem mentioning the fact that I have competition, or, pointing out who they are. Part of my objective is to be the most accurate election projectionist out there (so that, maybe one day, a political party will hire me to get their candidates elected, or, a media outlet will hire me to come in and talk about things whenever there is an election) Unless I can compare and contrast myself with my competition, I will never be able to do that.

I urge my readers to, if they follow any of these websites, encourage the webmasters to compare themselves as well. 

2 comments:

Alexandre said...

In fact, Bryan Breguet doesn't have any mastery of the French language. Il fait des erreurs de toutes sortes sur son blogue.

Unknown said...

Hum. Well Je suis parle francais tres tres petite. I use Google Translate, but what makes me a bit better, is once I translate from English to French, I though it back and translate it from French to English. I change words as needed until the results are the same back and forth. It takes a lot of work and still has errors. When I attempt to speak french without google translate you end up with "moi parle nes pas bon. Je suis la... uh... aller bon, uh... je nes pas parle acceptable. Je m'aider parle francais." and that usually hurts to read, so, I avoid it.