In Canada’s 2025 federal election, Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre, leader of the Conservative Party, lost his seat in Carleton, which he held for over 20 years .
This video covers the science of ballot bias and explains why long ballots have been shown to influence election results in studies on thousands of elections.
I’ll present statistical evidence that the 91-candidate ballot in Poilievre's riding may have contributed a sizable portion of the vote share to his liberal opponent, who was listed in a better ballot position.
We'll also examine Elections Canada data revealing systematic bias in 3 federal ridings targeted by the Longest Ballot Committee's candidate-stuffing strategy—all showing the same bias pattern found in studies of position bias from thousands of elections.
📂 SECTIONS:
2:00 Intro
3:47 (1) Candidate stuffing in Canada
7:27 (2) Psychology of ballot design
21:18 (3) Swing voter psychology
27:11 (4) Elections Canada data with position bias
30:02 (4.1) Evidence of position bias in Canadian Elections (THE KEY FINDINGS)
34:51 (5) Predicting Poilievre's actual vote share
37:48 Story from Elections Canada
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📖 CITATIONS:
Elections Canada Election Data:
https://enr.elections.ca/National.aspx?lang=e
https://www.elections.ca/map_02.aspx?lang=e&p=06_ON&t=/1Dis/35020&d=35020
https://www.elections.ca/content.aspx?section=pol&dir=par&document=index&lang=e
Poll aggregator:
https://338canada.com/
Election 2019: Liberal wins most seats in Parliament, but Conservatives win national popular vote:
https://angusreid.org/election-2019-trudeau-minority/
Why and when did uncommitted voters lock in? Study shows Liberals benefitted most from strategic voting
https://angusreid.org/election-2019-exit-poll/
Meredith, M., & Salant, Y. (2013). On the causes and consequences of ballot order effects. Political Behavior, 35, 175-197.
Söderlund, P., von Schoultz, Å., & Papageorgiou, A. (2021). Coping with complexity: Ballot position effects in the Finnish open-list proportional representation system. Electoral Studies, 71, 102330.
Blom-Hansen, J., Elklit, J., Serritzlew, S., & Villadsen, L. R. (2016). Ballot position and election results: Evidence from a natural experiment. Electoral Studies, 44, 172-183.
🎵 MUSIC:
Music by DJ Cugels with Analogue Dream 6a
https://www.youtube.com/@djcugels
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ax-zfdmiytg