ReachTEL showcases polling power in South Australian election

We watched with great interest as the South Australian election was held last Saturday. Leading up to the election there was an abundance of news articles on not only the power play between Rann and Redmond – but more surprisingly the little seat of Chaffey featured heavily.

Over the past thirteen years the seat of Chaffey had been held by Nationals member Karlene Maywald who was also the Minister for the River Murray and Water Security. In the past three elections Karlene had convincingly won her seat. Several issues surrounding Maywald came to light before the election and with the arrival of the new Liberals candidate Tim Whetstone, things were getting interesting for this rural seat!

You may be aware that Voice Broadcast technology is not only utilised in the marketing and notifications space, but that this technology has been used for political polling purposes since the 2007 Federal election. The ability to reach thousands of people per minute reduces lead times to mere hours as opposed to weeks when compared to other "traditional" contact methods. Not only is the technology more time efficient it is far more cost effective.

With upcoming Federal and state elections we decided to showcase our survey talents and what better way than running a poll in the seat of Chaffey! A newcomer vs. veteran - who could predict the outcome? Well us actually!

Starting on the 20th of January we ran our first of many polls into the area. 2,800 phone numbers to call and a short five question survey. The results were in - from the 231 completed surveys the Liberals had it: 59.7% to the Nationals 36.4% on a two party preferred basis with 3.9% undecided.

To give a better idea of the trend of voters we decided to run a regular poll up until polling day. On the 4th, 11th and 18th of March we conducted the exact same poll to the same list of people. As expected, over the series of polls we noticed a trend that minor party support waned and preferences for the larger parties started to grow.

The final poll run by ReachTEL on Thursday the 18th of March, two days before the election, had it at Liberals 50.2% - Nationals 47.6% on a two party preferred basis with 2.3% undecided.

The data from the final survey was incredibly close to that of the election results. For the minor parties we had less than a 0.5% variance on average and for the two major parties an average of 3.0% variance. Below are the results from our final poll compared to the actual survey results as of 29/03/2010.

We invite any company who is looking to survey their membership base or the local community to give us a call and discuss the benefits of Voice Broadcast.