Alberta Votes: Vote Compass users split on need for election

CBC Vote Compass users are split over whether Progressive Conservative Leader Jim Prentice needed to call theelection over changes his government put forward in the March 26 budget.

Overall, 28 per cent of respondents 'strongly disagreed' and 16 per cent 'somewhat disagreed' with the statement: "An early election is warranted given the significance of the new provincial budget."

• CBC Vote Compass

Twenty-four per cent of users 'somewhat agreed' and 17 per cent 'strongly agreed' with the statement.

Overall responses:

"Albertan voters are clearly split on whether or not the recent budget warrants an early election, though support for this idea is somewhat softer than the opposition to it," said James Aufricht, project manager for Vox Pop Labs, makers of Vote Compass.

The election is on May 5, a year earlier than the time set out in Alberta election legislation. Prentice said he needed a mandate from Albertans before implementing new taxes and spending cuts aimed at ending the province's dependence on oil revenues.

Younger Vote Compass respondents were inclined to agree an election was required with the strongest opposition coming from those 55 and older.

Responses by age:

Twenty-three per cent of users between the ages of 18 to 34 "strongly agreed"; another 35 per cent "somewhat agreed."

Meanwhile, nearly half (46 per cent) of respondents over 55 "strongly disagreed" with the need to go to the polls.

The answers were consistent despite people'sincome levels and whether they lived in rural or urban areas.

Responses by voter preference:

Note from Vox Pop Labson the methodology:

Developed by a team of social and statistical scientists from Vox Pop Labs, Vote Compass is a civic engagement application offered in Canada exclusively by CBC News.

The findings are based on 20,065 respondents who participated in Vote Compass from April 7 to April 9, 2015.

Unlike online opinion polls, respondents to Vote Compass are not pre-selected. Similar to opinion polls, however, the data are a non-random sample from the population and have been weighted in order to approximate a representative sample.

Vote Compass data have been weighted by geography, gender, age, educational attainment, occupation, religion, religiosity, and civic engagement to ensure the sample's composition reflects that of the actual population of Canada according to census data and other population estimates.