What was wrong with the polls?

There is also an incentive for them to adjust their figures so they hunt in a pack. While the individual commercial gain from being an outlier and right is considerable, so is the damage if you are wrong. If they pack together, they protect each other. This is what happens with oligopolies.

These may explain the issue, but there are other candidates. One is the allocation of preferences of minor parties, which is crucial to arriving at a two-party preferred vote. Newspoll used to allocate on the basis of the split at the last election. Now they ask voters who they intend to preference.

But that doesn’t solve the problem. Preferences count for minor parties, but minor parties generally don’t contest every seat. I might say I’m going to vote One Nation, but if they are not running in my seat I may do something other than vote for the party of my assumed second preference.

Another problem is personal votes.

If you don’t introduce candidate names into a poll you will get a significantly different read on what is happening. However, the tracking polling used by the parties does use candidate names, and as noted above, didn’t seem to get a markedly different result to the commercial pollsters.

This also favours governments in actual polls because of the sitting candidates’ incumbency advantage.

Some commentators were prepared to call the election based on a uniform swing. This is incompetence (yes, I’m talking about you Waleed Aly). Swings are never uniform, and while this doesn’t affect the accuracy of polls over the entire country, it means that significant polling margins can translate into very few seats.

Using the available quants, as well as the leaks from the major parties, I had Labor on 73 seats, and the government on the same number, in a prediction made on Thursday May 16. I was one of a group of nine, including some former very prominent political professionals who had lunch and put $50 into the middle of the table to back our judgment. We had no special knowledge, just what we could read in the papers. Seven out of nine predicted a hung parliament, and while our judgment favoured Labor it was by 73.44 to 71.11

So a careful read of the available information could get you close to the actual result, rather than Labor’s overblown expectations, despite the results of the polls.

Which means the commentariat can’t be allowed to blame the polls for their shortcomings – they had enough information.

Their problem is they are innumerate and have a naïve understanding of what polls are, what they mean, and what they can predict.

One factor hasn’t been mentioned in the commentary that I have read, and that is the role of the uncommitted voter.