Probing Public Opinion: the State of Valencia Experience

After a brief description of the electoral setup, we (i) outline the use of a simulated annealing algorithm, designed to find a good design for sample surveys, which is based on the identification of representative electoral sections, (ii) describe the methods used to analyze the data obtained from sample surveys on politically relevant topics, (iii) outline the proceedings of election day —detailing the special problems posed by the analysis of exit poll, representative sections, and early returns data— and (iv) describe a solution to the problem of estimating the political transition matrices which identify the reallocation of the vote of each individual party between two political elections.