The voting period for the referendum on electoral reform is coming to an end this Friday at 4:30pm.
We won't know the results for weeks. In 2011 for the HST referendum, Elections BC took almost 3 weeks to count all the ballots and publish the results.
Are you like me and you'd want to at least get an estimate sooner?
So here is what I'm attempting: let's crowdsource a poll! Google Survey allows us to run actual surveys/polls with actual sampling. I'm not talking here of those non-scientific polls done on websites. No, this is a proper poll with proper sampling and weighting, all done by Google.
It's also the cheapest option. At 20 cents per respondent, we can get a decent sample size for $200-$250 in total.
Such Google Surveys have been used in the US with great success. I myself ordered 3 this year. One as a test during the Ontario election (with results quite good to the final ones, although my poll was done in the middle of the campaign), one about Maxime Bernier's infamous tweet (can't compare to other polls) and finally one earlier during this referendum. This last one should convince people of the validity of the method as it gave results almost identical to the "regular" polls from other firms.
Yes I could order this poll myself but, as I said, I already ordered 3 this year. My regular job pays me well but I also don't want to keep spending hundred of dollars just to run this blog. Also, I believe this could be an interesting experiment: can we crowdsource the funding for a poll in Canada?
And just to be clear: if you think I'm making a ton of money off Google ads or whatever, you are wrong. This blog does generates some revenue during an election (like in October in Quebec) but it's nowhere near making a living and it has been super low during this referendum. So I'm not asking you to pay for a poll that will ultimately generates a ton of cash for me.
So I'm asking for your help, you fellow political nerds. You can pledge very small amounts of $5-$10. We don't need that many people to contribute to reach $250.
Once the funding is reached, I'll order the Google Survey. Ordering 1000-1200 respondents will take a few days. By experience it's slow at first, then picks up and is really, really slow for the last 50 observations. But by then we'd already have over a 1000 observations which is better than most other polls. I'll obviously only target respondents in BC aged 18 and over.
I intend to ask the following question:
"There was a referendum on electoral reform in British Columbia that ended this Friday. Which option did you vote for?"
3 choices:
"I voted to switch to proportional representation"
"I voted to keep the current system"
"I didn't vote"
Now, let's be clear, we'll get a lot of "I didn't vote". This is inevitable. This is why we want a large sample size to get enough voters. But we won't have undecided and this could be important. My daily estimates of the votes show that this could be a very, very close race.
If you want to help, here is the page. Don't hesitate to share it. Ideally I'd like the funding secured by Friday so that we can start right away. If it doesn't work, oh well, I tried.
