The Signal

Cutting through the noise in election forecasting

George Gallup, one of the early pioneers of modern public opinion polling, often referred to polls as the voice of the people. In a democracy, that voice matters — it provides governments with a window into the views of the people they represent and permits people to gauge whether governments are responsive to those views. But polls can be wrong, sometimes spectacularly so. This can undermine public confidence in polling or even misdirect voters who rely on these data to inform their vote.

To address this issue, Vox Pop Labs developed The Signal in partnership with some of Canada's most respected academics in the field of computational social science. The Signal is a sophisticated statistical model that estimates and adjusts for persistent differences between polling firms using years of historical polling data. It accounts for systematic bias across the polling industry as a whole by benchmarking against actual election results. The model learns from the history of where polls have been wrong and corrects for it in real time.

Outcomes and Impact

First launched in 2015 in partnership with the Toronto Star, The Signal has been featured by the Star in every federal election since, as well as in several Ontario provincial elections. Over the course of a decade, The Signal has consistently produced some of the most accurate forecasts of any poll aggregator or polling firm in Canada, making it a trusted source of information for millions of Canadians. Based on its enduring reliability as an authoritative forecasting model, the Star upgraded The Signal in 2026 from an election-specific feature to a permanent fixture on TheStar.com.