Before the student trustee elections the CU Daily Sun did a poll Who are you voting for for student trustee? which received 1072 responses. As only 3911 students participated in the actual election, I thought it would be interesting to see how highly correlated the two sets of data is. I took my numbers from the stage 1 results:

The coefficient of correlation is 0.57, and the pattern is fairly obvious. Brian Wolfel ‘10, Julie Geng ‘08, and Peirce Stern ‘10 were the only candidates to display substantially more Cornell Sun votes than real votes. Chris Gunderson ‘09, Graham Rengert ‘09, Karthik Rammohan ‘09, Michael McDermott ‘09, and Julie Cantor ‘09 received significantly more real votes than Sun votes. But some of these numbers are low enough that we can ignore them. After removing all the minor players, we’re left with a coefficient of correlation of -0.39 and this graph:

Now there appears to be no pattern. The Sun results are just good padding egos and saying who definitely won’t win the elections.