Posted May 13, 2009 by Sacha Peter
Category: Links
Bernard Schulmann has a lot of interesting insight on the 2009 election, including his review of the election, getting lots of votes and still losing (in addition to Vancouver Island being ripped off in terms of seat count vs. the number of voters).
Hopefully you’re already reading him.
Also, we are both looking to fine tune our performances in terms of predicting future election outcomes!
Posted April 26, 2009 by Sacha Peter
Category: Links
I have archived the two hours of radio debate that occurred on CKNW on Thursday, April 23, 2009.
I would have preferred to have it in a file format that is a little more internet-friendly, but this should open up in Windows Media Player.
8am to 9am on CKNW – 9 megabytes
9am to 10am on CKNW – 9 megabytes
Note the debate started at 8:30am, so fast forward half-way through the first file to start the debate.
Posted April 17, 2009 by Sacha Peter
Category: Links
The Globe and Mail has been keeping a BC Election blog handy, and it has made for fun reading. You may wish to put them on your reading list.
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Posted April 14, 2009 by Sacha Peter
Category: Links
Frances Bula has some remarks on a Harris-Decima poll that she had to endure. It was obvious by her transcription that they tried to stuff a bunch of surveys into one phone call, and just could be the reason why phone-based polling may be increasingly unreliable.
If asked, I always tell pollsters that I am a full supporter of the Marijuana Party. Since they are not running too many candidates this election, I may have to change my preference either to the Marxist-Leninists or the Sex Party. Tough decision.
On a more serious note, my guess is that anybody that follows politics is very likely a contaminated sample for pollsters.
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Posted March 4, 2009 by Sacha Peter
Category: Links, Parties
The party websites have put up their own candidate lists (finally). Here are direct links, in descending order of the number of candidates:
BC Liberals – http://www.bcliberals.com/EN/2009_candidates/
BC NDP – http://www.bcndp.ca/candidates
BC Greens – http://www.greenparty.bc.ca/candidates
BC Refederation – http://www.refedbc.com/2009/page5/page5.html
BC Conservatives – http://www.conservativesbc.com/CANDIND.htm
The Sex Party – http://www.thesexparty.ca/news/feb-2009-three-candidates-confirmed
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Posted February 26, 2009 by Sacha Peter
Category: Links
Alice Funke runs the Pundit’s Guide to Canadian Federal Elections, a very good (and truly non-partisan) resource for those wanting to analyze all sorts of information relating to federal politics. She’s got good database skills which enable to her to seamlessly project political data (voting results, campaign expenses, etc.) onto the website for all to see.
She gave me a plug, so I will give one back to her here – her project is excellent.
I will say that my approach has been somewhat less systematic than hers has been – probably because my database-to-web skills aren’t where I would like them to be. Also, when it comes to analyzing candidate expense returns, I would love to do it historically, but it is a painfully manual process to extract them from Elections BC and read them – they also compress their PDF files to a resolution that makes your eyes feel like they’ve been poked with an cattle prod if you read the documents for too long.
Posted February 4, 2009 by Sacha Peter
Category: Links
In one of the more unusually themed sites for BC Politics, we have PrayBC which delivers online prayers for BC politicians.
If this ends up delivering better government for us, I’ll take it!
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Posted January 21, 2009 by Sacha Peter
Category: Links
There are two benchmark sites that I will be using that I will consider my primary competition with respect to predicting the outcome of this election.
One is Milton Chan’s ElectionPrediction.org – he predicted 68 of 79 seats in the last provincial election.
The other site is the UBC Election Stock Market, which will open up on March 12, 2009.
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