Vision’s exit poll predicts Dan Whitmore to win first round of YUSU Presidential voting

Current YUSU Academic Officer, Dan Whitmore, is predicted to win the first round of presidential voting with 27% of the vote according to Vision‘s exit poll. He looks set to be joined by Cassandra Brown as York Sport President, George Offer as Academic Officer, Chris Wall as Activities Officer and Jemima Busby as Welfare & Community Officer.

However, Whitmore faces stiff competition from Sam Maguire and Josie Field who both have a clear lead over the 4th place presidential contender Tom Armston-Clarke. Cassandra Brown looks set to claim the Sport Presidency in the first round with 52% of the vote, while Academic and Activities are strongly led by George Offer and Chris Wall. Jemima Busby has a narrow lead on close rival Grace Winpenny for Welfare & Community and according to the poll will be unlikely to win on the first round of voting alone.

The poll took a random sample of 100 students and asked for their first choice candidates for the 5 Full-Time Officer positions. Vision‘s 2013 poll correctly predicted the election of Kallum Taylor, Cassandra Brown, George Offer and Daniel Whitmore but failed to predict Anna McGivern’s election as YUSU Activities Officer.

Vision will be live-blogging results night tonight from 8PM.

YUSU President

York Sport PresidentYUSU Academic OfficerYUSU Activities OfficerYUSU Welfare & Community Officer

12 thoughts on “Vision’s exit poll predicts Dan Whitmore to win first round of YUSU Presidential voting

  1. @Statistician if you read the article you’d see that they’re actually talking about who will win the first round, not who’ll win the election.

  2. @Statistician, I believe the “exit poll” results come from YUSU rather than being by Vision themselves. Anyone feel free to correct me on this.

  3. This is wholly useless as an exit poll. For one, it is NOT a real exit poll – if 2 people didn’t vote, then that means it’s not really an exit poll. The point of an exit poll is to determine how people cast their ballots; if you did not cast a ballot then you can not be part of the sample (casting a blank vote is NOT the same as not voting). So we already know this sample isn’t representative because we know the abstention rate is MUCH higher than 2%; YUSU has already verified this fact.

    Second, only is the sample size FAR too small to be vaguely significant in general (the theoretical margin of error being 9.7%), but we have no additional preference counts (an exit poll needs to accurately reflect the ballot to be realistic). Without preference flows, and in the absence of any other data to give us indication of subsequent preferences, all we can deduce from this poll is that one of the many top candidates will win. Though YUSU’s method of voting does overwhelmingly favour the winner of the first round, candidates do win on preferences.

    I understand that it’s harder to get what is traditionally considered to be a significant sample size (887 in the case of this election), but still, some kind of effort could go into this. At least attach a caveat to the poll rather than pretend, as you imply in your article, that you’re some kind of experts with decent methodology.

    If this poll is accurate, it will be the result of a freak stroke of luck, not sound methodology.

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