Coolhunting for the next Swiss Federal Councilor - yes it works

In the last three posts I have looked at what the crowd on the Web was saying about the chances of the 3 main candidates for Swiss Federal Councilor in the elections of Sept. 16 to succeed Bundesrat Pascal Couchepin. And note that we had to predict what the crowd was thinking what the 248 members of the Swiss National Assembly would be doing. The ranking was (see three previous posts):
1. Urs Schwaller
2. Christian Luescher
3. Didier Burkhalter

If you look at the voting in the Assembly yesterday, it is (from Wikipedia)


So the crowd PERFECTLY predicted the voting pattern in round 1!
The group dynamics in the Assembly in the succeeding rounds, and in particular the behavior of individual people like the withdrawal of Christian Luescher after round 3, the crowd can NOT predict, that's up to Mr Luescher - there are still good uses for the crystal ball.