With less than a week before the Toronto municipal election, some city council hopefuls have already crowned themselves early leaders based on raw data their campaign team has collected from the advance polls.
Ward 12 candidate Lekan Olawoye says that according to the data his team has collected since advance voting polls closed Sunday evening, he has racked up 36 per cent of votes. According to him, that puts him in the lead.
"These are the number of supporters we have," he told CTV Toronto while pointing to a Ward 12 map generated by his team.
The executive director of the non-profit For Youth Initiative doesn't have a crystal ball. His campaign team has cross-referenced all the people in his ward who have already cast their ballot for the upcoming Oct. 27 election with a list of voters who they believe are pro-Olawoye. That list is based on hand-collected voter data Olawoye’s team has accumulated since January.
"We go door-to-door and we mark people on a 1 to 5 scale -- 1 is really supportive, 5 is get off my porch," Olawoye said.
He is hoping to unseat incumbent Frank Di Giorgio in the hotly contested York South-West Ward.
Di Giorgio has represented that ward for the past 12 years. He faces stiff competition from fellow rivals John Nunziata and Nick Dominelli. According to the seasoned politician, while early data from advance polls is something his team takes into consideration in the final week of campaigning, he believes person-to-person interaction is the best predictor.
"The facial expressions, the friendly attitude that they demonstrate when you knock on their door -- I think that’s the most reliable of all indicators," Di Giorgio said.
His rival, former MP and city councillor Nunziata, also believes statistics are a poor indication of what the final numbers will be after Election Day.
"With every campaign, there seems to be this new technology but at the end of the day, what we always revert back to is the voter list and going door-to-door," he said.
Both Di Giorgio and Nunziata may be right about the value of early data. University of Toronto political science professor Nelson Wiseman says while early figures collected from campaign teams may be valuable at the federal and provincial level, on the local level, they aren't worth much.
"We haven't opened up the ballot box. So I'm skeptical," Wiseman said.
He says data-based predictions on the municipal level are generally less accurate because there is less funding behind them.
"Municipal candidates generally don’t have those resources. They cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to put together these massive data banks."
