The Vote share of the SPD equals the Index of the crude steel production in the western federal states — measured in millions of tonnes — in the year of the federal election.

The forecast hypothesis was signed by Jakob Maria Mierscheid, member of the DPS. Odd as it may seem, Mierchied’s law nailed the results of the last ten elections in Germany within two units nine times, and within one unit seven times. In 2002, for example, West Germany’s crude oil production stood at 38.6 million tonnes, and the SPD got 38.4% of votes: (This is an excellent example of the “correlation does not imply causation” principle in statistics. Just because two factors are correlated, does not mean that one of them is causing the other.)

But the model’s ability to predict election results quite accurately isn’t the only interesting aspect of this story: Jakob Mierscheid is not a real person. He is a hoax, a fiction. And even more interestingly, he is a maintained one; From Wikipedia: