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Alberta Provincial Election 2012
Voter Migration Matrix
Election Forecaster

developed by Prof. Werner Antweiler
Guess the probability with which a 2008 voter will vote for a particular party in 2012. The sum of each row in the table below must be equal to 1.000 precisely. Once you have completed your guess of the voter migration matrix, press the FORECAST button. The forecaster program will apply your voter migration matrix to the 2008 election results to find out which party will win in each riding. Leaving the matrix unchanged will display the 2008 election results. You can also display results riding by riding in descending order of the vote share to identify "safe" and "marginal" seats for individual parties.
Probability to migrate
from party in 2008 ...
... to party in 2012
PC LIB NDP WAP GRN OTH
Progressive Conservative PartyPC
Alberta Liberal PartyLIB
New Democratic PartyNDP
Wildrose Party of AlbertaWAP
Alberta Green PartyGRN
All Other PartiesOTH
Show results for individual constituencies:
Press to apply your voter migration matrix.
Press to set the voter migration matrix to the identity matrix.

Methodology:
 
Elections in Saskatchewan employ a "first-past-the-post" voting system. Thus the prediction of the election result in terms of the seats distribution in the provincial legislature is based on a prediction of the election result in each constituency. The use of a voter migration matrix reflects the notion that voters change their opinion about candidates and parties in a similar way across the entire province. That is, a party that gains or loses vote in one constituency tends to gain or lose votes in other constituencies. In the simplest form, this "swing" can be applied across all constituencies.
 
Naturally, applying this simple voter migration matrix to the election results from a previous election is a simplistic way of forecasting the outcome of a forthcoming election. It is simplistic in three ways. First, it does not reflect the change in population. Some children have reached voting age, some (mostly older) people have died, and other people have moved to Saskatchewan or have moved away from Saskatchewan. Second, it does not reflect the possibility that voters from the last election abstain in the forthcoming election, or abstainers in the last election choose to vote in the forthcoming election. Third, the voter migration matrix is applied identically across all constituencies, thus ignoring important local factors. A more sophisticated approach would take care of these three problems.


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