The Vancouver Scrum

The Election Prediction Project website has made its final predictions for the federal election. Unlike other prediction games, the EPP doesn't forecast seat totals; rather, it predicts the outcome of each riding and the adds up the results.

Liberal: 121
Conservative: 104
Bloc: 52
NDP: 29
Independent: 1

EPP was accurate in over 92% of the ridings in the 2000 federal election; they've had similar success in provincial elections in BC and Ontario, as well as the most recent UK general election. Their attempts at predicting the races in New Brunswick and Quebec haven't been as successful, most likely due to a limited number of project participants. Both NDP and Conservative partisans have accused the website of favouring the Liberals as the project's overseer is Milton Chan, a longtime Liberal activist. In fact, the project under-predicted the Liberals' seat totals in the 2000 federal election and last year's provincial contests in Ontario and Quebec.


In BC, they're predicting 23 Conservatives, 7 NDPers, 5 Liberals, and Independent Chuck Cadman in Surrey North. Liberals are forecast to win in Victoria, Esquimalt, two Vancouver ridings, and Burnaby-New Westminster; the NDP are the choice in the two mid-Island ridings, three Vancouver seats, Svend Robinson's old turf in Burnaby-Douglas, and New Westminster-Coquitlam. EPP forecasts the Conservatives sweeping the rest of the province, although almost completely shut out of the Burrard Peninsula of Vancouver, Burnaby, New Westminster, and the Tri-Cities.


The EPP's methodology is "prediction by submission." Participants ty to guess the winner in individual ridings, backed by whatever information they have at hand. The project's judges weigh each submission, giving more weight to those with a raft of facts to back their assertion and less to ill-informed postings or predictors who show a consistent bias. (If someone's predicting Grits all over the place, even in rural Alberta, chances are they don't get much weight; the same goes for someone calling ridings like York Centre for the Conservatives!) Somehow or other, they come to a conclusion for each riding based on those submissions; safe ridings are predicted early on; the last 80 or so ridings aren't called until a couple of days before the election itself.

You can browse through the website and look at the predictions and submissions for every riding, and judge the both the project and posters for yourself. (Confession: I did make predictions in a handful of local ridings, though I didn't participate during the writ period due to time constraints.)