[c.t.ner]

Originally Posted by jtfrogger

I am looking forward to hear the result of the latest polls. There are at least two recent polls. I got one call last night and one the night before. The call I got last night was interesting, in that it asked if 1CC would influence my vote. Obviously, this could be a private poll, but even these often get released unless the people paying for it really don't like the result.

Yes, we heard about this Robocall last night.

It wasn't tied to us as our budget doesn't allow us to run a Robocall campaign, nor have we endorsed the idea of Robocalls. For those curious our budget is $3,000 based on Elections Canada's rules for Third Party Registration in a single riding (which we are officially registered as). To be honest, it's quite flattering that one of the campaigns would try and and leverage us in this manner.

That seems like a lot of effort by 1CC for what seems like a predetermined endorsement of Turner. Tweets have been biased toward Turner. There seems to be a number of personal links between 1CC & the Turner campaign.

I'll throw this out there again, and I'll also place my personal reputation on this, but nothing with this process is predetermined.

At this point we have 500 registered voters, may look like at the end of the registration drive we have 700-800 people partaking. We also do not know which way the votes will swing until everything is tabulated. From my standpoint, I'm curious as to how it all plans out. How the questions are arranged will provide some interesting information into not only who people support, but who they think will win.

At the end of the we're hoping to get the opinion of 700-800 residents of Calgary Centre. Who the collective endorses is who the collective endorses.

Now this process of registering with validation. Sure, it shows that they are going above and beyond to screen out duplicates. However, this will by no means be a random sample. This is very biased toward those that are very active online. Turner's campaign is very actively promoting that people sign up. Given that it appears that Turner has the strongest volunteer army, his supporters will dominate the poll. The sad part is 1CC will use this "validation" process to argue that it was an impartial process.

I agree with you that Turner supporters are very active online. I guess the question is if Harvey or Meades campaign were as active or more active online would the project be biased to Harvey or Meades? Is Twitter more biased to Turner or Harvey because many of the users are online? Is Tumblr more biased to Harvey because the campaign has a Tumblr blog? At the end of the day the 1CalgaryCentre project was a tool for people in the riding to find out more about the candidates and it was a tool for the campaigns to leverage. All three campaigns were well aware of the process when we started in July/August. We can't control who embraced it and who chose not to, we have been encouraging all "progressives" in Calgary Centre to participate - it's always been open to everyone.