Forum polls and the Toronto Mayoralty

There has been a fair bit of skepticism voiced on social media this week about Forum polling in the Toronto mayoralty race.  Forum uses interactive voice recognition (IVR) polling as its method. Essentially a computer calls you and a recorded voice leads you through choices you enter on the telephone keypad - I have been polled by Forum a number of times over the years including during the current civic contest (When being quizzed by Forum I am reminded of the Woody Allen joke in Annie Hall: "I would never want to belong to any club that would have someone like me for a member.")

Forum's results are clearly different from others. Other polling companies including Ipsos-Reid, Nanos and Mainstreet Technologies have polled in recent weeks. Here is a table with results comparing the average of Forum's numbers with the others taken since mid-September.

	Olivia Chow	Doug Ford	John Tory
Forum Polls	21.8	33.6	40.0
Other Pollsters	25.9	27.8	46.1

As one can see clearly Forum reports results that are clearly more favourable to Doug Ford than the others and less favourable for both John Tory and Olivia Chow.

What to make of this? One way would be to examine Forum's recent efforts in other elections. Most recently it conducted a poll during the New Brunswick election held September 22, 2014. Forum reported a tie in the popular vote but predicted that the PCs would win the most seats. By comparison, Corporate Research Associates, a Halifax based polling firm that uses conventional live telephone interviewer polling predicted that the Liberals would win the election by nine percentage points. The actual result produced a Liberal majority based on an eight point lead in the popular vote.

In Ontario there were many more polls. Out of seven pollsters who conducted a poll towards the end of the campaign Forum had a total error greater than all but one other pollster. Here is a table displaying the total error comparison:

One comment on Twitter suggested taking another Forum poll result with a truckload of salt.  As Sarah Palin would say: "You betcha".