sondagSee the elections

Method

Sondagio does not conduct polls. We collect the polls that pollsters publish and calculate averages with public rules, the same for every party and candidate.

Sources

  • Polls: every published poll, most often through the compilations on Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0), which link to each original release. In France, the notices filed with the Commission des sondages.
  • Polls commissioned by a party or a campaign are left out of the averages.
  • Results: the electoral authority of each country. Maps: official results and open boundary files.

The average

  • For each pollster we keep its latest poll whose fieldwork ended within a set number of days before the most recent poll. The window is shown on each page.
  • We then take a simple, unweighted mean for each party or candidate. Each pollster counts once, however often it polls.
  • The range between pollsters is shown next to the average, so one surprising poll does not look like a landslide.

The latest poll first

Most readers want the newest numbers, so each page leads with the most recent poll. When an average rests on few polls, we say how many, down to a single poll.

Seats, maps and forecasts

Seat projections, maps by district and forecasts are models, always labelled as estimates. As a rule they start from each party's last result in each district, shift it by the change in its national average, and allocate seats with the country's own rules (thresholds, D'Hondt or Sainte-Laguë, electorates). Each page gives the details and the limits.

Events and the polls

For a dated event (an election call, a scandal, a disaster), we compare each pollster with itself: its last poll before and its first poll after. Mixing pollsters would turn their usual differences into fake movement. A party “rose” only if every pollster shows it rising; “most pollsters” means all but one. These pages say the polls moved after an event, never that the event caused it.

Poll bans

Where the law bans publishing polls before a vote (France, Spain, Italy, Poland, New Zealand, Mexico, Argentina and El Salvador, among others), our pages freeze for that period on the figures published before it.

Independence

Sondagio's founder has no ties to any candidate or campaign. The averages are calculated by formula from every published poll; no figure is adjusted by hand.

Corrections

Errors are corrected openly, with the date of the change. To report one: hey@nwsly.co.

Each election in detail

Every election page has its own method section: which polls count, the scenario used, the seat rules and the poll ban.