A supporter of Liberal Rolf Dinsdale reacts to election results that show Conservative candidate Larry Maguire extending his lead in the Brandon-Souris byelection in Brandon, Man., Monday night, Nov. 25, 2013. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Trevor Hagan

More from Paul Adams, available More from, available here

In the 1968 federal election, when I was 13, my buddy Jimmy Stubbs and I volunteered for a local candidate in our Winnipeg riding.

We were low in the hierarchy and so, in the cramped committee headquarters, we were relegated to the toilet — the only space available for us to rubber-stamp voting information on thousands of cards to be dropped off on doorsteps.

Every time someone needed to use the room for its designed purpose we needed to — what’s the word? — evacuate, with all our paraphernalia in tow.

One evening, Jimmy and I decided to advance our prospects by getting into the polling game. Our methodology was simple. With our knowledge of riding geography derived from the rubber stamps, we used the phone book to find constituents and called them up from Jimmy’s parents’ basement.

My recollection is that we desisted after a couple of dozen “completes”. This was partly because our phone technique was not completely professional. Our voices hadn’t broken yet and when respondents demanded “Who is this?” we had a tendency to abruptly hang up.

We were also discouraged by what became increasingly plain to us: Our guy was going to lose.

The next day we returned to our toilet with less than our usual enthusiasm, burdened with our secret knowledge.

I thought of this the other day as the media reported some startling results in a series of polls from Forum Research ahead of Monday’s four federal byelections. What caught everyone’s eye was the suggestion that the Liberals could win Brandon-Souris, which has gone Conservative in every election but one since it was formed in 1953. Forum had the Liberals up by 29 percentage points.

Now, for the most part you don’t see the big-name political pollsters such as Ipsos, Nanos, EKOS (for which I once worked) or Environics polling in byelections. There’s a good reason for that. Byelections are notoriously hard to get right.

One of the difficulties pollsters struggle with these days is that voter turnout is falling lower and lower. It’s very hard to say who among those who pick up the phone and answer a pollster’s questions will actually get out on election day to vote. And it turns out that phone-picker-uppers and actual voters differ in unpredictable ways.

This problem is especially acute in byelections where voters are less engaged, and so turnout is lower and even less predictable.

Established pollsters stay out of byelections in part to protect their good names — making it tempting for relative upstarts like Forum to jump in to make theirs.

Why, you may ask, did the media report the Forum polls at all? It may be, as some critics say, that journalists report these polls simply because they are credulous idiots. But I don’t think so.

Forum has had a pretty mixed record in previous forays into byelection polling, notoriously declaring that the provincial Progressive Conservatives had Ottawa South “in the bag” last summer a few days before they lost the riding to the Liberals.

It could also be that the specific methodology Forum uses — interactive voice response, what some people call ‘robocalls’ — is not well suited to byelections. I have some experience with IVR from my days at EKOS and it can be very effective in national polling because it is cheap and can pull in enormous samples. However, it has a very poor response rate, meaning you have to make a lot of calls. There were reports of some people in Brandon-Souris being called six times by Forum in the course of the campaign.

So why, you may ask, did the media report the Forum polls at all? It may be, as some critics say, that journalists report these polls simply because they are credulous idiots. But I don’t think so.

In fact, some reporters have made a practice of ignoring Forum, whose methodology has been attacked by rivals at Ipsos-Reid and Abacus, and critiqued by more neutral observers such as Éric Grenier at the blog 308.

Some news organizations reported the Forum polls more or less uncritically. Others, such as the Winnipeg Free Press — to its credit — reported the Brandon-Souris poll along with all the reasons to hold it suspect.

Unlike scientists, even social scientists, journalists routinely deal with partial, imperfect information that they know falls well short of certainty. They may get a leak from a meeting, for example, which they know to be one-sided. But they put it out there, knowing that it will pressure the other side to speak out and believing that, as a result, more and more will become known, incrementally.

For journalists, gathering and disseminating information is an iterative process in which you get closer and closer to the truth, perhaps without ever getting all the way there.

The fact is that had it not been for the Forum polls, the media might have missed what was probably the biggest story of the byelections — which was that the Liberals were surprisingly competitive in Brandon-Souris, where they had taken just 5 per cent of the vote in 2011. Certainly, without the Forum polls the media would not have been cued to the Liberal surge as early as they were.

So like the poll Jimmy and I did in 1968, the information wasn’t perfect. It may not even have been scientific. But it was information that could be chewed on, criticized, contextualized and evaluated. And that was better than nothing.

By now, I imagine you’ve figured out that Forum’s poll in Brandon-Souris was wrong — spectacularly wrong. It was way, way outside its own claimed margin of error. Rather than winning the seat by 29 percentage points, the Liberals lost in a squeaker.

You are probably wondering also about the poll Jimmy and I conducted. Sad but true, our candidate lost. Exactly as we predicted.

Follow Paul Adams on Twitter @padams29

Paul Adams is a veteran of the CBC, the Globe and Mail and EKOS Research. He has taught political science at the University of Manitoba and journalism at Carleton. His book Power Trap explores the dilemma of Canada’s opposition parties.

The views, opinions and positions expressed by all iPolitics columnists and contributors are the author’s alone. They do not inherently or expressly reflect the views, opinions and/or positions of iPolitics.