[Read: Justin Trudeau, the Instagram Prime Minister, Struggles to Resonate With Young Voters]

As I travel around during this election, I’ve been struck by the notable resilience of lawn signs. The age of social media and mobile communications has not caused them to wither away. If anything, they seem more common than ever, which may be a factor in calls from some City Council members in Ottawa, where I live, to banish them from public property.

Campaigns seem to spend a lot of time and money designing and handing out signs. And judging from the places I’ve been recently, many voters are happy to make a democratic statement in their front yard, in a street-facing window or on a balcony.

But do lawn signs actually matter? To find out, I spoke with Janet Brown, who runs an independent polling firm in Calgary. She answered at least one aspect of that question in a project with Duane Bratt, a political scientist at Mount Royal University, which is in the same city.

Most polls, of course, come up with national or provincial popular vote numbers for each of the parties, but (readers in Canada can skip ahead) Canadians don’t vote for their prime minister or governing party. A general election here is a collection of 338 votes for local members of Parliament.

Ms. Brown told me that there are a lot of hurdles to doing accurate polls for individual constituencies or ridings. “Lawn signs seemed to me to be a good proxy for support at the riding level,” she told me, adding that she persuaded Professor Bratt to join her in a “silly project” to test that idea.