Related papers: Bias and Excess Variance in Election Polling: A No…
Polls posted on social media have emerged in recent years as an important tool for estimating public opinion, e.g., to gauge public support for business decisions and political candidates in national elections. Here, we examine nearly two…
Accounting for undecided and uncertain voters is a challenging issue for predicting election results from public opinion polls. Undecided voters typify the uncertainty of swing voters in polls but are often ignored or allocated to each…
Voter fraud in the United States is rare and the vote-counting system is robust against tampering, but there remains widespread distrust in the security of election infrastructure among the public. We consider statistical means of detecting…
Social media platforms allow users to create polls to gather public opinion on diverse topics. However, we know little about what such polls are used for and how reliable they are, especially in significant contexts like elections. Focusing…
To many statisticians and citizens, the outcome of the most recent U.S. presidential election represents a failure of data-driven methods on the grandest scale. This impression has led to much debate and discussion about how the election…
Electoral forecasting is an ongoing scientific challenge with high social impact, as current data-driven methods try to efficiently combine statistics with economic indices and machine learning. However, recent studies in network science…
Understanding political phenomena requires measuring the political preferences of society. We introduce a model based on mixtures of spatial voting models that infers the underlying distribution of political preferences of voters with only…
While the polls have been the most trusted source for election predictions for decades, in the recent presidential election they were called inaccurate and biased. How inaccurate were the polls in this election and can social media beat the…
In the months leading up to political elections in the United States, forecasts are widespread and take on multiple forms, including projections of what party will win the popular vote, state ratings, and predictions of vote margins at the…
Forecasting elections -- a challenging, high-stakes problem -- is the subject of much uncertainty, subjectivity, and media scrutiny. To shed light on this process, we develop a method for forecasting elections from the perspective of…
U.S. Presidential Election forecasting has been a research interest for several decades. Currently, election prediction consists of two main approaches: traditional models that incorporate economic data and poll surveys, and models that…
We examine probabilistic forecasts for battleground states in the 2020 US presidential election, using daily data from two sources over seven months: a model published by The Economist, and prices from the PredictIt exchange. We find…
We investigate whether Large Language Models (LLMs) can track public opinion as measured by exit polls during the 2024 U.S. presidential election cycle. Our analysis focuses on headline favorability (e.g., "Favorable" vs. "Unfavorable") of…
Election poll reporting often focuses on mean values and only subordinately discusses the underlying uncertainty. Subsequent interpretations are too often phrased as certain. Moreover, media coverage rarely adequately takes into account the…
This paper examines the dynamic relationship between electoral polls and indicators of economic and financial uncertainty during the last two U.S. presidential elections (2020 and 2024). Using daily polling data on Donald Trump and measures…
Overestimation of turnout has long been an issue in election surveys, with nonresponse bias or voter overrepresentation identified as major sources of bias. However, adjusting for nonignorable nonresponse bias is substantially challenging.…
Several measures of partisan bias are reviewed for single member districts with two dominant parties. These include variants of the simple bias that considers only deviation of seats from 50% at statewide 50% vote. Also included are…
Online data has the potential to transform how researchers and companies produce election forecasts. Social media surveys, online panels and even comments scraped from the internet can offer valuable insights into political preferences.…
Post-election audits use the discrepancy between machine counts and a hand tally of votes in a random sample of precincts to infer whether error affected the electoral outcome. The maximum relative overstatement of pairwise margins (MRO)…
This paper uses daily Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System data to estimate the causal effect of the 2024 U.S. presidential election, a highly competitive race whose outcome resolved lingering uncertainty on election day, on…