Fuzzy approach gets sharp result for poll wonks

IN these nutty political times, calling election results is a bit like gazing into a rubber ball. Ask the UK’s top polling companies, which got both the Brexit referendum and the last general elections hopelessly wrong.

The world’s top pollsters might consider popping down to Pretoria East for some tips on how to analyse an electorate. Last week, a team of statisticians and programmers at the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) were amazingly accurate in their predictions of the final municipal election results — long before the majority of votes had been counted.

Using only the first 10% of voting districts to come in, at 5am on the day after the vote, the CSIR team predicted the final shares for all the major parties in every metro to within 1.5 percentage points — barring Tshwane, where the DA did unexpectedly well in township.

“Our eThekwini predictions were at the most 0.3 percentage points out,” said team member Peter Schmitz.

The team used their model to forecast the hung councils in Johannesburg, Tshwane, Ekurhuleni and Nelson Mandela Bay, along with the DA’s increased majority in Cape Town, and the ANC’s retention of eThekwini, Buffalo City and Mangaung.

“The scoreboard looked quite odd when we made our predictions,” said team member Zaid Kimmie.

The DA was leading in Johannesburg, for example, because many of the earlyreporting districts were in DAleaning areas. But the board slowly but surely converged with the CSIR forecast as ANC-leaning township counts streamed in.

Kimmie said the predictive model was first commissioned by the Independent Electoral Commission for the 1999 general elections, as a way of detecting fraud or anomalies during the counting process. In all the elections since, the SABC has commissioned the CSIR to repeat the trick.

The model’s secret ingredient is a set of “fuzzy clusters”, said Kimmie. Over the past five elections, the project has defined 20 distinctive groups of voting districts per province — each characterised by factors like race, income and histories of party support.

By quickly spotting the early voting patterns for each cluster, the team were able to accurately extrapolate the bigger picture.

The CSIR’s dream team of wonks were Kimmie, Schmitz, coder Brenwen Ntlangu, Jenny Holloway, Ndumiso Cingo, Nontembeko Dudeni-Thlone and Luyanda Vappie.

They spent the election encamped at the IEC results operations centre, with their computers plugged into the SABC’s machines, which in turn were linked to the IEC’s network. No supercomputers were needed. “There is a lot of data, but with the computing power we have these days, you could have run it on a cellphone at a stretch,” Kimmie said.

He said the results revealed a big stayaway by former ANC voters. “About two million of them didn’t show up. Some of them, a very small percentage, changed their vote to the EFF or the DA.”

He said the EFF’s claim that its share of the vote accounted for all of the ANC’s loss of support was “wishful thinking”. THE Numsa-aligned United Front has not lived up to expectations, failing to win votes from Nelson Mandela Bay’s metalworkers.

But the party that had the backing of the former Cosatu general secretary, Zwelinzima Vavi, the general secretary of the National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa, Irvin Jim, and the former mayor of the metro, Zanoxolo Wayile, declared itself happy with the single seat it won.

This week Vavi, whose face was on UF election posters, declined to answer questions on the party’s poor performance.

In the run-up to the elections, the UF portrayed itself as a significant force in Nelson Mandela Bay, claiming it had support from the many Numsa members who live there.

Numsa was expelled from the ANC-aligned Cosatu early last year and UF leaders had hoped that disgruntled Numsa members in Nelson Mandela Bay would ditch the ANC in favour of their party.

But the UF bagged a mere 0.83% of the votes — which translates into just one seat on the city council.

Mkhuseli Mtsila, regional secretary of the UF in Nelson Mandela Bay, blamed the poor showing on a lack of campaign resources.

He said that, for now, the party was satisfied with its single seat. “We now have a footprint and are involved in coalition talks, meaning we are a role-player in the political landscape.”

The party is among those being courted by the ANC to form a coalition government.

The UF also received a whipping in municipalities such as East London’s Buffalo City and Bitou in the Western Cape. But it has emerged as the official opposition in the Senqu municipality in the Eastern Cape.

With the computing power we have these days, you could have run it on a cellphone