Can a Computer Predict Your Vote?
About this Event
Event description
What would a computer need to know to predict how you vote? Your age? Your neighbourhood? The issues you care about? For decades, researchers and political campaigns have tried to turn the messy business of human choices into something a machine can model. Long before today’s AI headlines, people were already asking whether computers could make politics more predictable.
Drawing on his book SimPolitics, Fenwick McKelvey takes us into the history of efforts to simulate voters, elections and even international affairs. We will explore how researchers and political professionals built models of political behaviour, what they hoped those models could reveal, and what happens when complicated human decisions are translated into numbers.
The question is not just whether a prediction comes true. It is also who builds the model, which assumptions go into it, and what gets left out. By looking at the history behind our faith in political prediction, this talk offers a fresh way to think about today’s claims that technology can help fix democracy.
What the audience will walk away with
- A look at how researchers have tried to model voters and elections, and why predicting political behaviour is more complicated than it sounds.
- A clearer sense of the assumptions that go into a political simulation, and how those assumptions shape what the model can show.
- A historical perspective on the relationship between computer models, political campaigns and attempts to predict world affairs.
- Better questions to ask when a technological tool is presented as a solution to a political problem.
About the speaker
Fenwick McKelvey is a professor in Concordia University’s Department of Communication Studies, where he researches digital politics, algorithms and technology policy. He is the author of SimPolitics: America’s Quest to Solve Politics with Computers, which explores the history of efforts to model elections, voters and international affairs.
Good to know
Under 18 with parent or legal guardian.
Agenda
🕑: 06:30 PM - 07:00 PM
Opening + Settling in seats
🕑: 07:00 PM - 07:45 PM
Talk
🕑: 07:45 PM - 08:00 PM
Q/A
🕑: 08:00 PM - 08:30 PM
Mingling and enjoying the rest of the event
Where is it happening?
Event Location & Nearby Stays:
CAD 17.49 to CAD 33.51
