Election 2015

[PuckChaser]

Judging from the email addresses the ladies on the site must have been very busy...... female names appear to be vastly outnumbered by male names

Not likely: http://www.wired.com/2015/08/happened-hackers-posted-stolen-ashley-madison-data/

“Avid Life Media has failed to take down Ashley Madison and Established Men,” Impact Team wrote in a statement accompanying the online dump Tuesday. “We have explained the fraud, deceit, and stupidity of ALM and their members. Now everyone gets to see their data…. Keep in mind the site is a scam with thousands of fake female profiles. See ashley madison fake profile lawsuit; 90-95% of actual users are male. Chances are your man signed up on the world’s biggest affair site, but never had one. He just tried to. If that distinction matters.”

 

[Kat Stevens]

Judging from the email addresses the ladies on the site must have been very busy...... female names appear to be vastly outnumbered by male names

Not surprising, women are it's target demographic.

 

[Lumber]

Ok I think we need a different thread for these, but here's one more:

http://www.cnn.com/2015/08/20/us/josh-duggar-ashley-madison/index.html

As more of these come to light, I expect this whole ordeal to become a lot more entertaining.

Hmmm... I just realized I'm more interested in seeing how this plays out then the Duffy affair. Is there something wrong with me?

Mods for your action.  :highjack:

 

[Edward Campbell]

Actually, polls don't count until October 19th; everything else is noise.

But the polling firms are worried, according to this article which is reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions of the Copyright Act from the Globe and Mail:

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/survey-says-the-future-of-polling-is-hard-topredict/article26042112/

Margin of error
Gauging voter intentions has never been easy, but after several spectacular recent flops, Canada’s pollsters are trying to return the industry to its once credible predictor of public opinion, reports Eric Andrew-Gee

ERIC ANDREW-GEE
The Globe and Mail

Last updated: Thursday, Aug. 20, 2015

It seemed like a safe prediction.

As chief executive officer of Abacus Data, a polling company, David Coletto had followed the 2012 Alberta election closely. In the campaign’s final month, his polls and those of his competitors showed the same thing: The right-wing Wildrose Party, led by Danielle Smith, was winning. In its final survey, Abacus had Wildrose up by 10 percentage points over the Progressive Conservatives.
So on April 23, as people across the province cast their ballots, Mr. Coletto was interviewed on Sun News Network and said the obvious: Ms. Smith would be the next premier of Alberta.

Mr. Coletto recently described what happened next.

“The results started coming in,” he said, “and my face goes white …”

The PCs had won easily. Their margin of victory, almost 10 points, was the opposite of what Mr. Coletto had predicted.

That election left Canada’s polling industry shaken. It wasn’t just scrappy upstarts such as Abacus that had blown the call – veteran firms such as Leger Marketing had misfired, too.

Nor was 2012 an anomaly: Alberta-scale disasters have become increasingly common in the world of public-opinion research, from Israel to Scotland to the United States.

In Canada, with a federal election looming, the polling industry is in a nervous state. Its earnings are shrinking, its reputation is tarnished and its methodologies are in flux. Known for their bravado and influence, many pollsters have been left feeling vulnerable.

“These are not the golden days of polling, that’s for sure,” said Scott MacKay, president of Winnipeg-based Probe Research. “There are many reasons and they sort of overlap and intersect with each other. It’s sort of the perfect storm.”

All images from the Globe and Mail article

Election-related revenues are a fraction of Canada’s $500-million polling industry – less than 4 per cent, according to the Marketing Research and Intelligence Association (MRIA) – but they play an outsize role in pollsters’ fortunes.

The lead-up to a vote is a smorgasbord of free publicity for companies such as EKOS, Nanos and Ipsos.

“Doing this work is almost the equivalent of a fashion gangplank,” said Angus Reid, 67, whose storied career in polling includes the founding and selling of his eponymous company. “It’s an opportunity to show off their research.”

By the same token, the spectre of failure looms over pollsters throughout a campaign. A botched election forecast is an excruciatingly public form of failure: Curtis Brown, vice-president at Probe, admitted to having anxiety dreams about fiascos such as the 2013 B.C. vote, which his colleagues in the industry got spectacularly wrong. (Probe didn’t have a poll in the field.)

The upcoming federal election appears especially difficult to call. The most recent Nanos Research poll for The Globe and Mail essentially shows a three-way tie, with the Conservatives, NDP and Liberals separated by less than the margin of error, each hovering around 30 per cent.

But even in the best of times, gauging voter intentions is fraught with difficulties. There are the “Shy Tories,” well documented in Britain, who deny that they intend to vote Conservative until doing just that.

The “Bradley effect,” meanwhile, is named after a black candidate for governor of California who led in the polls right up to voting day before losing to a white opponent.

In the privacy of the polling booth, fickle hearts and cold feet often prevail. As Abacus’s Mr. Coletto put it, “Ultimately, people are really unpredictable.”

People are even less predictable if you can’t get in touch with them and pollsters are having more trouble on that score. They now find themselves in an awkward state of technological limbo: With both phone and Internet polls plagued with problems, the industry lacks a consistent, affordable way to reach a wide swath of the population.

No less an authority than Nate Silver – the writer and statistician whose nearly perfect predictions of the past two U.S. elections made him a polling superstar – has warned of a sustained dip in quality.

“Polls, in the U.K. and in other places around the world, appear to be getting worse, as it becomes more challenging to contact a representative sample of voters,” he wrote in a post on his website, FiveThirtyEight.com, after this year’s British election, when polls failed to predict a Conservative majority.

Pollsters themselves are acutely aware that the industry is amassing a growing tally of failures. The jitters have gotten so bad that even polling successes now come laced with anxiety. When Albertan voters stampeded into the NDP camp ahead of this year’s provincial election, polls accurately picked up on the stunning shift. But some in the industry were “so spooked,” Mr. MacKay said, “that they didn’t even believe their own numbers.”

“The NDP was up 15 points the day before the election,” he added, “and you saw these guys on TV and their eyes were shifting and they were saying, ‘You know, anything can happen. People change their minds.’”

Fittingly for number crunchers, the pollsters’ malaise can be quantified: In 2004, the MRIA reported that its members earned $574-million; in 2014, that number was down to $509-million.

“Our industry has definitely taken a hit,” said Sébastien Dallaire, vice-president of public affairs at Leger Marketing.

It has been a gradual but painful descent for a sector that journalists and politicians once accorded a kind of mystique. In the late-1970s, the empirical weight of opinion-poll pronouncements was a new force in Canadian politics; pollsters, it was thought, wielded survey results as if they were crystal balls.

By the early 1980s, declining long-distance rates and the ubiquity of land lines led to a spike in telephone polling. Suddenly, it was cheap to call Canadians across the country, and, significantly, Canadians were picking up.

“The brilliance of polling in the 1980s is that virtually everyone was accessible through a single means of technology – the telephone,” said Andrew Laing, president of the media monitoring firm Cormex Research.

Angus Reid’s refusal rate was about 15 per cent in those days, he says – so nearly nine in 10 people who picked up agreed to answer his questions. Some people even complained when they were denied the novelty of having a pollster call them at home.

“In the early eighties, this was viewed as pretty sexy stuff,” Mr. Reid said. “Polling had sort of arrived from the margins to the mainstream and everyone loved it. It was really the salad days of the industry.”

Suddenly, pollsters such as Allan Gregg and Darrell Bricker were everywhere – advising political parties, being quoted on front pages and leading the nightly news, they had become minor celebrities.

“It was really exciting,” said EKOS Research president Frank Graves, who founded his company in 1980. “It was a period where you felt pretty comfortable that you knew how to do things, people listened … and you made a lot of money. It was a pretty good deal.”

But starting in the early 2000s, technological and social change began dulling some of the industry’s lustre.

Many cite weaker voter loyalty as a hurdle to predicting elections. “People are far more pragmatic and spontaneous than they used to be,” Probe’s Mr. MacKay said, “which is a nightmare for a pollster.”

Even more daunting, though, is the issue of getting voters to answer questions about their political preferences on the phone. More than half of Canadians under 35 don’t have a land line, and tracking down cellphone users is more expensive since they aren’t listed.

At the same time, caller ID has made it easier for land-line users to ignore pollsters. And those who do pick up often promptly hang up again, thinking they’ve encountered a hated telemarketer.

“It’s a call from someone they don’t know and it’s all the same,” Mr. Brown lamented.

Refusal rates for political polls, once below 20 per cent, now often top 90 per cent.

The growing inefficiency of paying for live interviewers has driven the industry toward less expensive techniques such as Interactive Voice Response (IVR) – robo-polling – and online panels.

That lower cost has allowed a raft of new firms such as Abacus, which does 80 per cent of its polling online, to enter the field.

“I don’t think Abacus could have started the way that we did 10 years ago,” Mr. Coletto said. “Physically, we needed some office space, a few computers and an Internet connection.… There are some barriers to entry, but they aren’t physical or capital-related.”

The old guard often treats these newcomers with thinly veiled contempt.

“There are a lot of people playing at this,” said Mr. Bricker, CEO of Ipsos Public Affairs. “You see these people pop up – who knows what their motivation is. To get a little publicity.”

Still, online polling has many credible proponents – Mr. Reid himself uses Web panels for his non-profit research foundation, the Angus Reid Institute. Boosters point to the different kinds of questions they can pose on the Web, asking respondents what they think of video clips or passages of text.

Mr. Reid, meanwhile, touted the relative intimacy of Internet questionnaires, which allow for interviews on sensitive topics such as sexual harassment that people might be uncomfortable discussing over the phone.

But finding a good response pool online is a “bit of an art form now,” Mr. Reid acknowledged. While randomness was once a watchword for pollsters – ensuring that samples weren’t self-selecting and skewed – Internet panels now solicit members with Web ads, often asking participants to complete multiple surveys in exchange for Air Miles, donations to charity, concert tickets and other goodies.

“Increasingly, people expect to be compensated for their time,” said Mr. Coletto, who conducts his polls through a panel of 500,000 people compiled by a separate market research firm.

Critics warn that polls conducted through these panels can yield warped results, since respondents have volunteered to participate and might be more opinionated than the general population, or motivated by money.

Nik Nanos, CEO of Nanos Research, which does live-agent phone polling for The Globe, said two-thirds of the polls conducted in Canada wouldn’t pass muster for publication in The New York Times, mainly because they aren’t random enough.

Online polls aren’t always wrong, he said, but they aren’t consistent either. “Do you want your survey right 19 times out of 20, or 15 times out of 20?” he asked.

Pollsters who try to take soundings from social media are greeted with even more skepticism. “Wild, voodoo polls,” Mr. MacKay called them.

“I see some of these Facebook polls and it makes me want to puke,” Mr. Reid said.

As dubious polling becomes more prevalent, the industry looks poised to have an unusually large impact on this year’s federal election. About two-thirds of voters are determined to replace the Harper government and many believe that whichever left-of-centre party looks likeliest to accomplish that goal will reap a bumper crop of strategic ballots.

That calculus will be heavily determined by polling: If the NDP, for example, leads by a healthy margin at the start of the campaign’s home stretch, lukewarm Liberals could flock to the orange tent – or vice versa.

In an effort to shore up their credibility and their bottom lines ahead of such a crucial test, Canadian pollsters have begun trying to self-police. Mr. Bricker was recently elected chairman of one such group, the Canadian Association for Public Opinion Research, which launched in June. It plans to set standards around transparency and polling methods to hold firms accountable when things go pear-shaped.

“In Canada, everybody just kind of runs away,” he said. “It hurts the industry, but most importantly, it’s a disservice to democracy.”

Others, such as Mr. Graves and Mr. MacKay, predict a return to old-school techniques such as door-to-door surveys, which they think could bolster polling’s legitimacy.

“I know it sounds primitive,” Mr. MacKay said.

Primitive maybe, but it could just prevent another Wildrose moment for pollsters.

I will be very happy to be corrected by someone who has actually studied (rather than just read about and observed) mass communications, but, in my opinion:

    Polling works, at least it does in its original (pure) for of market research. Corporations can, and do, find out what you want by asking you a (relatively) few and often deceptively simple questions; but

    Advertizing works, too, and those same corporations can, and do, change your preferences through well crafted advertizing campaigns that often use market research data, sometimes just
    by carefully "mining" the same market research data they used to determine your preferences, but looking deeper into your preferences and finding out what your deeper desires might be;

    Good polling is expensive, as the article points out, and the public polls are "free" to you so the firms that do or commissions them (media outlets) try to do polling "on the cheap" which might backfire; and

    Some polling firms are in a conflict of interest because they poll for special interests or for the parties, themselves, and they do public polling, too.

I think all those factors come together to make public polling more and more difficult to get right.

    First, I believe that parties often (usually?) have pretty good, fairly reliable polling data that tells them something akin to the real "truth."

    Second, I think that the parties then use that good information to craft ad campaigns that are designed to make you and I change our minds as we get closer and closer to voting day, thereby confounding the public polls.

    Third, I suspect that we are, generally, disengaged from policy politics and more attuned to promises politics: we tend to focus on the new, shiny, loud promises, not the lengthy, complex, quiet proposals.

 

[MARS]

    Third, I suspect that we are, generally, disengaged from policy politics and more attuned to promises politics: we tend to focus on the new, shiny, loud promises, not the lengthy, complex, quiet proposals.

I agree, but am not at all surprised.  After all, Kim Campbell was absolutely correct when she stated that "an election is no time to discuss serious issues". 

 

[Oldgateboatdriver]

First good Election joke out here:

"Gilles Duceppe walks into a restaurant, so the Maitre D greets him: Good afternoon Mr. Duceppe. Party of two?"  ;D

 

[CougarKing]

In spite of what is said below, the NDP has never had a coherent defence platform. Furthermore they have candidates like Andrew Seagram, who once compared Canadian Soldiers to Palestinian suicide bombers.  :facepalm:

Globe and Mail

Why defence matters in this election
GEORGE PETROLEKAS
Contributed to The Globe and Mail
Published Wednesday, Aug. 19, 2015 3:06PM EDT
Last updated Thursday, Aug. 20, 2015 11:23AM EDT

George Petrolekas is a fellow with the Canadian Global Affairs Institute. He has served in Bosnia and Afghanistan and has been an adviser to senior NATO commanders.

Normally, in Canadian elections, defence is an afterthought. In the past decade, defence featured because of our engagement in Afghanistan. This time, defence may form, in part, the path to power.

More than any other party, the heretofore unseen NDP defence platform will have much to do with whether the party forms the government.

For years, the NDP has functioned as the social conscience of the nation. Its base of committed voters historically has not been large, but NDP policies have influenced every other party’s social platforms for decades. But to affect other parties’ platforms is not the route to power, only to influence.

In the 2012 election, the NDP captured the imagination of many Canadians, particularly in Quebec, vaulting the NDP to official Opposition status and putting the party within striking reach of forming a government. But its being on the cusp of power induces fears in some that an NDP government would displace what is positioned as a more principled and muscular vision of the country.

For the Liberals, an outlook that appears to be at variance with the grand liberal internationalist viewpoints appears to be struggling to find a foundation on which to rest. Is it activist? Is it isolationist? Is it globally responsible? These elements do not seem clear at all so far in this campaign.

To achieve power, the NDP will have to balance its perceived root philosophies with enough centrist positions to attract on-the-fence Liberals, and even some Conservatives willing to take a chance on Thomas Mulcair as prime minister. It is doing so with middle-of-the-road economic positions, but will have to be seen as more centrist on the defence file as well.

The NDP has narrowed its margin of manoeuvre, given its current stand on the anti-ISIS mission by declaring its first act would be to bring the troops home – in contrast to what most Canadians believe. In three national polls conducted during the mission-extension debate, a majority of Canadians (as many as 74 per cent) supported the air campaign and its extension. In earlier polling by Ipsos Reid, Canadians agreed that “everything possible” needs to be done to stop ISIS from establishing its self-declared caliphate – the Islamic State, as the group now refers to itself – and that included putting Canadian boots on the ground. Surprisingly, this pro-mission support was echoed in Quebec as well.

The whole NDP history on defence will be ridiculed by Conservative Leader Stephen Harper, including its long campaign to have Canada leave NATO during the Cold War. Mr. Harper won’t do that with Mr. Trudeau, because previous Liberal governments decided to send Canada to Afghanistan. As such, Mr. Trudeau’s current ideas on interventions abroad will be questioned.

And so for the NDP, the tipping point to power may indeed become the position it will take on its vision for the Canadian Forces.

NDP Leader Thomas Mulcair will likely try to offset a perception of weakness in this area by outlining a comprehensive defence policy, likely reaffirming peace missions and care for veterans. It would go over well as many centrist Canadians have not abandoned the attachment to Canada’s blue-beret past.

The Liberals, in comparison, have a far more difficult task in front of them. So far, they have not been able to carve an identity that is clearly identifiable in the minds of voters. If anything, they have minutely calibrated on the edges, but not enough to create a discernible difference. No air strikes for example, but far more training of advisers.

If the Liberal position is unclear with respect to current engagements, so far, there has been little indication from either the NDP or the Liberals on what kind of military Canadians should be entitled to or how they would use it, except to say that fixing the Royal Canadian Navy would be a priority.

Mr. Harper is not immune on this file, either. Given past experience on the F-35, various procurement delays, and veterans, Mr. Harper generally gets a free ride because of perception of being action-prone abroad; the deep defence cuts of the past two years glossed over in part by rhetoric, and his willingness to use the Forces in the Ukraine, in support of NATO and also against ISIS.

NDP candidate Andrew Seagram quote from Toronto Sun column:

Andrew Seagram, who is running for Team Mulcair in Guelph, says “Idolizing our soldiers as heroes” is “as dangerous as proselytizing a suicide bomber.” Neither is “a hero or a martyr.” Oh, and he likens Christians to the “mentally ill,” too.

 

[Edward Campbell]

Do the Liberals or the NDP have a guy like Jason Kenney, someone whose own seat is pretty secure who can be sent everywhere, especially into every ethnic nook and cranny, to curry favour and votes?

He's like the bloody Energizer bunny ...

 

[Brad Sallows]

>to curry favour and votes

Serendipity strikes.

 

[dapaterson]

For some reason, the National Post has taken down a column written by Margaret Atwood which satirized people's obsession with the hair of the various leaders.  Fortunaetly, Google can be relied on to cache such things.

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache%3ANNY9M7J2kGIJ%3Anews.nationalpost.com%2Ffull-comment%2Fmargaret-atwood-stephen-harpers-bad-hair-days+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=ca

Hair is in the election-season air, but is it crucial to the question of your vote?

...

Let’s try this hair quiz:

Of the three national male leaders, which one travels with a personal grooming assistant – lavishly paid for in whole or in part by you, gentle taxpayer – so that none of his hairs will ever be out of place, supposing they are indeed his and not a wig, as some have supposed? (Hint: Initials are S.H.)

Which leader, on the other hand, doesn’t need such an assistant because his hair is “nice” enough already? (Hint: initials are J.T.)

And which one wouldn’t know what a personal grooming assistant was if he fell over one? (Hint: Initials are T.M.)

Yes! You got it right! Smart you!

Next: Why should the taxpayer foot the bill for the micromanagement of Harper’s hair? Is his hair in the public interest? Is it crucial infrastructure? A matter of national security? Or is the pampering just a matter of narcissistic vanity?

 

[Fishbone Jones]

There was a time I had a smidgen of respect for Atwood. Now it's gone. The only reason she continues to get awards for her pulp fiction prose, is because she's a CBC\ liberal shill. I don't believe anyone outside that faction has even finished one of her intolerable tomes.

 

[cavalryman]

There was a time I had a smidgen of respect for Atwood. Now it's gone. The only reason she continues to get awards for her pulp fiction prose, is because she's a CBC\ liberal shill. I don't believe anyone outside that faction has even finished one of her intolerable tomes.

The continued adulation of Atwood's prose is pretty much all you need to know about what's wrong with the field of Canadian literature in general.  There are any number of good Canadian authors who can't get the time of day in their own country, yet they get mucho sales and respect in other parts of the Anglosphere.  BTW - I can't remember who first came up with the meme, but Mags does look like PET in drag once you let yourself think of it.

 

[Fishbone Jones]

Or the Chicken Lady from KITH https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9T38OcxS30g

 

[Altair]

There was a time I had a smidgen of respect for Atwood. Now it's gone. The only reason she continues to get awards for her pulp fiction prose, is because she's a CBC\ liberal shill. I don't believe anyone outside that faction has even finished one of her intolerable tomes.

The conservatives were the ones who made hair a election issue.

 

[Brad Sallows]

Canada sure has a leg up on the US when it comes to finding important issues - hair styling, whether or not Duffy received a private loan offer - to talk about.  Southwards, all they have is whether or not some candidates have been leaking vital national information by using private computers for public business and trading the well-being the populations of entire countries (Libya, Syria, Iraq) in order to burnish credentials ("We always wanted to have a war record for you") for a presidential run.  The progressive / left down there would also probably like to talk about important issues like hair - they are trying so earnestly to move the conversation away from trivial matters to weighty ones.

 

[Fishbone Jones]

The conservatives were the ones who made hair a election issue.

Seriously, you do know it's not about the hair, right? Someone with the vast political knowledge you have, should be able to discern that from a mile off.

 

[X Royal]

 

[Brad Sallows]

"'E say 'e knows f* nothing...I say 'e knows f* all!"

 

[Jed]

Has anyone seen the article by Christie Blatchford that ponders on who is paying Duffy's hi speed lawyer bill?

The hypocrisy of a complicit Media / non governing parties that blow this relatively minor matter into a conflagration at the expense of the governance of the country, meanwhile ignoring serious issues is appalling.

 

[Edward Campbell]

Has anyone seen the article by Christie Blatchford that ponders on who is paying Duffy's hi speed lawyer bill?

The hypocrisy of a complicit Media / non governing parties that blow this relatively minor matter into a conflagration at the expense of the governance of the country, meanwhile ignoring serious issues is appalling.

Here is a link to the article in which Ms Blatchford suggests that Don Bayne is doing this pro bono, essentially for free, because he believes there is an important principle at stake ... just as Nigel Wright says he believed that it was right for him to give Mike Duffy the money to pay back the public purse.