TY - JOUR A1 - Fritsch, Markus A1 - Haupt, Harry A1 - Schnurbus, Joachim T1 - Efficiency of poll-based multi-period forecasting systems for German state elections JF - International Journal of Forecasting (Online ISSN: 1872-8200) N2 - Election polls are frequently employed to reflect voter sentiment with respect to a particular election (or fixed-event). Despite their widespread use as forecasts and inputs for predictive algorithms, there is substantial uncertainty regarding their efficiency. This uncertainty is amplified by judgment in the form of pollsters applying unpublished weighting schemes to ensure the representativeness of the sampled voters for the underlying population. Efficient forecasting systems incorporate past information instantly, which renders a given fixed-event unpredictable based on past information. This results in all sequential adjustments of the fixed-event forecasts across adjacent time periods (or forecast revisions) being martingale differences. This paper illustrates the theoretical conditions related to weak efficiency of fixed-event forecasting systems based on traditional least squares loss and asymmetrically weighted least absolute deviations (or quantile) loss. Weak efficiency of poll-based multi-period forecasting systems for all German federal state elections since the year 2000 is investigated. The inefficiency of almost all considered forecasting systems is documented and alternative explanations for the findings are discussed. KW - Fixed-event forecasting KW - Multiple lead times KW - Forecast efficiency KW - Weak efficiency concepts KW - Quantile loss KW - Election forecasting Y1 - 2025 U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:bvb:739-opus4-18793 VL - 41 (2025) IS - 2 SP - 670 EP - 688 PB - Elsevier CY - Amsterdam ER -