Selb et al. (Forecasting Runoff Elections Using Candidate Evaluations from First Round Exit Polls. International Journal of Forecasting 29: 541-547) introduce a simple method of forecasting two-round elections: (1) surveying the voters’ candidate evaluations in first-round exit polls, (2) post-stratifying the sample to official first-round returns, and (3) redistributing the votes for eliminated competitors according to their supporters’ lower-order preferences. The authors successfully employ the method to forecast a small-scale local election where the selection of polling places is not an issue. We propose a preliminary step in which polling places are being sampled in accordance with their closeness to returns in previous elections in order to enhance the method's usability for large-scale national elections. We apply and evaluate the extended method using the 2017 French presidential race as our empirical case.
