Research on Voter Migration

The Election Forecaster is an analytical tool developed for researchers of Canadian elections as well as traders on the Sauder School of Business Prediction Markets. The Election Forecaster's predictive ability is based on a "voter migration matrix". A user of this software can guess the probability with which a voter of a particular party will vote for the same or another party in the forthcoming election. Once all probabilities have been guessed and entered into an on-line form, the voter migration matrix is applied uniformly in each electoral district. This leads to predictions of the votes for each party, including a prediction of the winner in each riding. The sotware also identifies "safe" and "marginal" seats for each party. The Election Forecaster is available for the following forthcoming elections:

Prof. Antweiler's research paper Estimating Voter Migration in Canada using Generalized Maximum Entropy (Electoral Studies 26(4), December 2007, pages 756-771) discusses applications of voter migration. A non-technical discussion of the paper has Re-engaging non-voters key to election victory: UBC Study appeared in UBC Reports 54(10), 2 October 2008. More information about voter migration is available on a dedicated web page about voter migration.