To what extend can one use Twitter in opinion polls for political elections? Merely counting Twitter messages mentioning political party names is no guarantee for obtaining good election predictions. By improving the quality of the document collection and by performing sentiment analysis, predictions based on entity counts in tweets can be considerably improved, and become nearly as good as traditionally obtained opinion polls.
A similar method of counting Twitter messages mentioning political party names was applied to predict the 2011 Dutch Senate election REF .
Predicting the 2011 Dutch Senate Election Results with Twitter
Proceedings of the Workshop on Semantic Analysis in Social Media
Political Science