SU Results Analysis 2013

This was a triumph. I'm making a note here: huge success.

Well, sort of. With only two races to check, having my model get 2/2 races correct could have been just chance. Let's take a look.

Yesterday my prediction was for Petros to beat Saadiq by a margin of 39.6%-35.1%, and William  to beat Kevin by a margin of 47.9%-35.5%. In reality, Petros won by a margin of 41.9%-38.8% and William beat Kevin by a margin of 53.0%-36.5%. On average, there was a 3.0% difference between what I predicted and what happened.

[Note: I realize of course that it's possible for someone to edit a blogger post. To cover my bases, I uploaded a screenshot of the post at 5:00 pm yesterday, and you can check the date the photo was uploaded.]

Part of the reason for the differences in the race for President was that I considered Anthony Goertz as a legitimate candidate. This was pretty much just a judgement call. My model typically lumps joke candidates and None of the Above into the same category which often works reasonably well. If I had put Goertz in that category, the race for President would have been predicted to be 43.9%-38.8% - only an average of 1.4% difference from the actual results.

To see how this compares with the results from before, take a look at this graph:

Comparing this to the previous iteration of this graph, it looks like the data points fit quite nicely. How cool is that?

Update!

At the request of some people, I've added this little excel web app. It will let you pitch any of the candidates of this election against each other in a fierce battle. You can have all eight competing if you really want!



Two points:
1) Please insert their name exactly as it was on the ballot. For instance, use "Josh Le" instead of "Joshua".
2) This used the budget values that they used for their actual election, so it may be a teensy bit unfair to pitch a candidate from an uncontested race against one that was contested.

Back to the original post:

Another thing I tried this year was to project the voter turnout before the election was finished. This graph shows the actual voter turnout and my projection of the actual voter turnout for each hour throughout the election:

In general there are two points in the graph where the projection significantly changes, and these take place between around 10:00-13:00 on each day. A cooler way of showing it is this:

Compared to previous years, this year had a much stronger showing on the second day relative to the first day, which is pretty cool. This could maybe be a sign of campaigning on voting days taking more of an effect.

The method itself of using the previous  trends to project voter turnout may not have been super accurate (my mid-day Wednesday projection was off by 1.4%), but it's possible that it may get better as it becomes more refined.

Anyway the end there got kinda rambly - sorry about that. Look at me still walking when there's science to do!

SU Model Results

This is a post that is going to have some numbers. Because of all the numbers, I'm going to have a disclaimer, and like all good disclaimers it will start in the form of a story.

Once upon a time, a washed-up old SU hack came up with an idea. He wanted to see if maybe there was a correlation between numerical inputs and voting results in elections.

So he made a machine. The machine ate numbers, and spat out numbers. 

And he saw all that he had made, and it was very good.

Well, maybe not. Using three years of election data to calibrate the formula is good for validating it. Having a model that takes old data and correctly predicts what happens in past elections is lovely, and the fact that it is as accurate as it is looks really good on paper. However, it is likely prone to over-fitting - small things that make the model accurate in older years may have been coincidences, or are not important in future years.

So with all that, let me say that I have no reason to believe these numbers are going to be particularly accurate. This is truly just me taking a formula that worked for previous elections, and using similar inputs to try to come up with numbers.

Note: One of the inputs is the budget summaries, available here.

President
Petros:  39.6% First-round votes
Saadiq: 35.1% First-round votes

Probability of Petros Kusmu winning: 70.2%

VP Student Life
Kevin:  35.5%
William: 47.9%

Probability of William Lau winning: 97.8%

Good luck...

A Message to Science Students

If you're a science student and you voted No on Sci5, you've made a huge mistake.

Hear me out for a second. This is completely irrelevant to any of the proposals that Sci5 put forward. I don't care why you voted no - in fact the merits of Sci5 are completely irrelevant to your error.

Bylaw 8200 of the Students' Union governs the process for levying a fee on students. Specifically, in order for a FAMF like Sci5 to be implemented, it needs to pass two criteria during voting:

• A majority vote in a general election agrees with the fee, and
• At least 15% of the faculty voted (section 18).

 Let's assume that the voter turnout for science this year is going to be similar to last year's total SU turnout (21.6%). This satisfies the second point listed above, and then as long as more than half (about 10.8% of science students) vote yes, the referendum passes.

However, if the students who were opposed to Sci5 just didn't vote in the first place, the referendum would have failed unless there was an overwhelming majority in favor. In fact, in a situation like this, voting the way you want could hurt your cause, which violates one of the most basic criteria of voting systems.

Normally this wouldn't be a terrifically large issue. For instance, last year's Science FAMF referendum got a turnout of 30.6% - at that point more than 15% of students could have voted yes, and every vote against would have been necessary to defeat it. It also wouldn't be much of an issue if you didn't know what the turnout of the election was going to be. The SU, though, regularly updates students on voter turnout, which is almost asking for the system to be gamed.

Basically, if I was an organizing an anti-Sci5 campaign, the best strategy to tell possible voters would be to not vote, and wait. Wait until the Science turnout hits over 15%. Maybe it won't, and you'll have won. If it ever does, then I'd get out as much of the vote as possible to try to tip the scales.

You'll note that I waited until after the Science vote hit 15%, just because I do actually abhor voting systems that allow rigging like this (not that I'd be particularly likely to influence anything, of course). I've proposed solutions to this back when I was a councillor, and I truly hope this gets fixed in the future.

Vote Turnout Projection [Update Thu 08:00]

Current turnout projection: 20.0%

Here are two new graphs, updated as of this morning. If you compare the first one with the previous set of graphs, you can see that it generally followed the predicted trend in shape, but was just slightly lower than anticipated.

Original Post:

After last year's election, I mentioned that when you look at the trends in voting behaviour between various elections, they're almost always the same. In fact, if you overlaid them (and corrected for length of election and total number of voters), they were very nearly identical.

What's really cool about this is that if you know the turnout at any given time, you can try to project the total voter turnout by the end of the election (assuming that the pattern holds this year).

So I did that.

Check it out. I have two graphs. The first one shows the total turnout so far (solid line) and the project turnout based on the curve from previous elections (dashed line).

And the second one compares turnout to projected turnout.

What's really cool about the second one is that the projected value hasn't deviated by more than a couple percent hour-to-hour for the last couple of hours. This suggests that the trend from the last couple of years has been followed pretty closely for a while now, although the beginning of the day was slower than anticipated.


Stay tuned for updates!

SU Elections: President 2013

Hey there!

As someone who hasn't been a U of A undergrad for a while, there's really no reason you should actually be interested in what I have to say about the SU race for president. And yet here you are. 

Some of what I have to say here will be repeated in The Gateway's election dissection, but since I did that I've had more time to go over the platforms. And here is what I think:

Anthony Goertz
I fundamentally do not understand what Anthony is trying to do here. In a letter to The Gateway, he mentioned that he is not taking the campaign seriously, and that he is instead running because "the system is allowing [him] to make posters" he doesn't have to pay for. What? I guess he's protesting the fact that any ol' student can run for an election and print posters (the horror....) by wasting students' money printing posters (that haven't been plastered all over campus as far as I can tell).


Saadiq Sumar
I've known Saadiq for about two years now, though I'd known of him for a bit longer than that. He took up the glorious position of Engineering Students' Councillor after I graduated (tiny size 7.5 shoes to fill, there), and after a year of that became the VP Student Life for 2012-2013. Before that his bio says he was involved extensively with Lister.

His website is honestly a bit rough. I know that shouldn't be a focal point, but it contains two pages - one of which is a platform that is long enough that the major points aren't on the first screen you see. His platform itself is organized under three categories:

Protecting Students
His first point here is "accessible and affordable education" which is such a cliche it's not even worth really mentioning. If his best approach to this is showing members of the board the plight of the student, I wouldn't be surprised at all if he doesn't get any further than any predecessor. He also mentions reducing rent increases, which he then admits is something he's already doing. It's also something he has to do under policy. Fighting the mandatory meal plan seems like a good idea, but it's hard to support a mandatory PAW center fee and a mandatory U-Pass, and oppose something else that's mandatory when the reasons for its mandatoriness (ok, maybe that's not a real word) are fundamentally the same.

And lastly, as a member of an executive that has a) liberally used extensive in camera debates on motions that are supposed to protect students, and b) proposed bylaw changes that restricted advocacy efforts of non-Council elected student representatives, I have to question where this sudden urge for student representative empowerment comes from.

Health Initiatives
Here's some more tangible promises. For instance, expanding the campus health week. That's a good idea. I can get behind that. Programming options during reading week is also completely reasonable. Increasing the number of pet therapy days is potentially just a pretty flashy promise, but it's not without its merits (But llamas? Really?), and can probably be fairly easily achieved. Finally renewing the health and dental plan seems is great too.

Though none of these are perhaps revolutionary, they're all solid ideas, they are likely to have some tangible benefits, and it's likely that they can all be accomplished through a term.

Sustainability
I sort of don't understand his first point, which is about the SUB food court waste audit. The bins in the food court are absolutely beautifully labeled as it is, so I imagine there would be a large sense of diminishing returns in actively having volunteers out there educating people. Otherwise, sifting through the trash sounds like a rotten idea (pun). If there's money to be saved then I suppose it's not a bad idea, but simply auditing something just to get a report doesn't seem like the most efficient way to increase sustainability.

The other two points, gender neutral washrooms and a sexual minority and gender diversity service, seem like things that are so perfectly suited to the planned SUB basement renovation that I wonder why they're not already part of the renovation plans. Seriously - why propose demolishing and reconstructing existing washrooms when you could have incorporated them into the renovations you've been a part of planning for the last year? This is literally the perfect opportunity to arrange for the most accessible washrooms the world has ever seen, and without the constraints of existing walls you could easily arrange them in a format that everybody is comfortable with. While we're at it, if you want to add a new service, toss that in the mix for reno plans too.

Horse With a Gun
Horse With a Gun is the funniest joke campaign since Soundwave.

Petros Kusmu
This is now the fourth year I've known Petros. Our friendship could have a Bachelor's degree by now, if only it had applied itself and not skipped all those Sociology classes. In the time I've known him he's done three tours of Students' Council, and most recently this year was the VP External for the SU.

If I was a bit harsh on Saadiq's website, then I have to tear Petros's to bits. It's a facebook page. It's not only just a facebook page, but it's a facebook page with last year's platform still on it. It's a facebook page where, whenever he updates a status or responds to a comment, his platform sinks lower and lower down the page and becomes harder and harder to find.

Once you finally find his platform, it's in the form of a gigantic pdf. It is also broadly organized under three general categories:

Ensuring Stability
Right off the bat Petros mentions that he wants to work with the SU General Manager. Thank goodness - it would be really awkward otherwise. Joking aside, he wants to have open and constant communication with stakeholders during the SUB renovation project. Fascinatingly enough, he mentions that the renovations are a good time for gender neutral washrooms and a sexual minority center. This leads me to the inescapable conclusion that this is likely to happen anyway and isn't really much of a promise for either candidate...

Then he mentions continuing to assist advocacy efforts of residence students. And then he mentions continuing to advocate against MNIFs. I guess not deviating from current advocacy efforts is lovely, but making a campaign promise out of continuing to do the same is really not all that clever. Really this should be assumed until he proposes something new - otherwise any candidate could just list their job description as a platform and have a massive one.

Exploring New Ideas
Petros wants to conduct a feasibility study on creating a service that would assist students in entrepreneurial pursuits. Feasibility studies unfortunately sound like a bit of a cop-out - you write a report, and regardless of if anything comes of it you can still count it as a victory. Also, doesn't the U of A already do something like this?

Similarly, "re-evaluating ways to better support student groups" falls under a similar category of possible cop-out, and continuing to have CASA advocate for anything is, by definition, not a new idea.

Ignoring the language of 'beginning a dialogue', exploring the idea of block courses is at least a new and tangible promise. It could be interesting to see where this goes - having taken a one-week course over the summer at the U of A before (oh wait, that sometimes already happens?), I can see the value in offering new education options to students. This would need to be a long-term project, but it will be cool to see if anything comes out of it. Also, it's something different between Petros and Saadiq, which is nice to see.

Improving the Culture within the Students' Union
"Seeking feedback from past and current Councillors on ways to improve Students' Council." Though Petros has admittedly made attempts while a councillor to change Students' Council (two particular student/councillor groups come to mind, for instance), it seems a bit weird that after 5 years he's still promising to fix council.

Expanding SUBtv and Infolink to Augustana and Campus Saint-Jean is a decent idea though. I'd be really interested in seeing where that goes.

Fundamentally my major problem with Petros's platform, though, is that the majority of his promises involve starting a consultation on something or continuing to act in a way the SU already does. While these are likely the best way of going about anything as SU president, the language comes across as so watered-down that it's tough to tell how much is actually new and creative.


So
What do I think will happen? I had that model thing from before, but it's still waiting for a few election campaign parameters (the most important being spending patterns in the campaign budget). I'll come back at you with a prediction when those get released!

Also, sorry if this comes across as mostly cynical. I have a great deal of respect for both significant candidates (and a healthy respect for Horse), and was honestly hoping for more creative and original platforms. They both have a few concrete promises in there, though, so I hope this was at least moderately helpful. Also, 1,562 words? Sorry about that.

What the candidates really think

Now that the SU elections have officially kicked off, candidates are running around campus trying to secure votes. One of the earliest features available to potential voters is the Candidate Bios page on the SU website.

Instead of telling you what I think of the bios just yet, I'd like you to take a look at these pretty word clouds I made of the bios.

The first one is just for the presidential candidates:

(click to zoom in)

And the second one is for all candidates:

(click to zoom in)

So what do the candidates care about? STUDENTS. Wow do they ever. They also seem to like "campus", "university", and "year" a lot.

What do candidates seem to forget about? Voting. On the first cloud you can barely see it between the S and T of 'Students', and on the second one it's hiding on the far right. Seeing as the language used when soliciting votes can apparently significantly effect the outcome, this is maybe a bit of a missed opportunity for our candidates here.

Come back for more election stuff in the near future!

Female Candidates (Part 1)

There has recently been a lot of discussion recently regarding females being under-represented in SU elections on campus.

Quite a lot. All over the place. Honestly. Well, ok, mostly at the Wanderer and all over Facebook.

Frankly, yes, this is an issue. While there are no established barriers to female candidates, we cannot deny that there simply aren't any female candidates this year, and I would further venture that we can't deny that this is a bad thing - this really ought to be addressed.

Unfortunately, everyone seems to have wildly differing opinions as to why this phenomenon is occurring. While y'all can go debate fancy things like sociology, I'm thinking of (over the next little while) taking a look at it from a statistical point of view. Who knows - perhaps this could be similar to the Berkeley Sex Bias case I wrote about earlier, and the problems are more fundamental and basic. Who knows indeed...

In the meantime, here's a fancy thing I learned how to make after looking around on the internet. Enjoy! The size of each block is the size of the faculty, and the colour represents the faculty fraction that is female (with green meaning overwhelmingly female, and red being overwhelmingly male).

EDIT: Source

Voting Behaviour

Hey bloglodytes,

I realize it's been a month since my last post, and I apologize profusely. Not too much, though, since I can check the stats and you have not, by-and-large, been impatiently checking for regular updates. Shame.

On a related note, привіт to the randomly high number of readers from Ukraine!

This is just a short post discussing some of the preliminary results of an analysis I've been interested in doing for a while now. When it comes to SU voting on campus, people often talk about the "Lister vote" or the "Greek vote" as though they're massive and important voting blocks that need to be either wrestled with or courted. (Let me be clear here - when I say "people" talk about it, I really mean about six people, including me, who have nothing better to do and go out for beers altogether too infrequently)

If it turns out that there is any sort of consistency within these voting groups, that would certainly be cool to know as a potential candidate. Unfortunately, the only way to find this out would to look at anonymized versions of full ballots, and compare voting trends within a ballot. For instance, if a significant number of voters clump Lister or Greek candidates together on a ballot, it would be very easy to identify a trend.

Unfortunately the CRO is reluctant to share this sort of information (cough cough), so the closest we can come to this sort of analysis is by attempting to recreate ballots based on the results read-out that's provided following the elections. This is annoying.

With all that being said, the initial (VERY PRELIMINARY) results from last year's election suggest two cool findings about trends within voting.

The first one isn't really that surprising: voters who vote None of the Above as their first choice have virtually random subsequent vote selection. Any given ballot that ranked NotA first and a candidate second was evenly split between all remaining candidates (within 4%). When comparing these subsequent votes to the distribution of first round votes, they aren't even close.

The second one truly only comes from one datapoint, so I'm hesitant to say anything firm on it quite yet. However, an analysis of the Presidential race shows that voters who ranked Farid (Greek) higher than both Colten (Greek) and Adi (not so Greek) were more likely to vote for Adi than voters choosing their first round picks.

Don't get me wrong, in both cases voters choosing only between Colten and Adi preferred Colten by a ratio of about 3:2, however instead of seeing lots of Farid voters subsequently go on to prefer a fellow Greek (The "Greek Hypothesis"), Colten actually got 7% less of the vote share than when looking at first-round votes.

So that's cool.