Meet Metapoll: Australia's newest pollster

There's a handful of polling organisations and we put a lot of stock in all of them. But what if one poll could pull together results from all of them? Introducing Metapoll...

It's well and truly polling season, with Australia just over 70 days away from a double dissolution election.

But this year's pre-election polls may look a little different if a Sydney start-up has anything to do with it.

University buddies Osman Faruqi and Matt Schiller are the founders of Metapoll and both come from very different backgrounds.

Osman is a former Greens political candidate, while Matt is medical graduate turned entrepreneur with a passion for numbers.

Whatever their politics, together they're ready to shake up our electoral coverage with what they claim is Australia's most accurate polling system.

"Political polling in Australia has such a high profile," says Osman.

Source: The Feed

"We've lost more Prime Ministers in the past decade to bad poll results than we actually have at the ballot box.

"Kinda the idea behind Metapoll is that if polls are going to have such a big influence on politics and the way they engage in it, then it's important that they're accurate and they represent the actual mood of voters."

Launched last month, Metapoll is what they call a poll aggregator.

"Basically what we do is we take every publically published opinion poll there is - so there's Newspoll, Ipsos, ReachTEL - we take those, we look at their past performance, we look at how big they are, what methods they use, and a whole bunch of other factors," says Matt.

"The theory goes that the more people you poll, the more representative the data"

"Then into that mix we throw our own polls as well so the pool is really big, as big as we can get for a particular two week or one month period.

"Then with all of that we add betting odds in the political betting market. We combine it together with the polling data to get one final result which is the Metapoll result."

The theory goes that the more people you poll, the more representative the data. By combining the data, Metapoll says it can produce a result with a margin of error of less than one per cent.

Source: The Feed