What the heck is psephology?

In an opening sentence that I certainly wouldn't write in the hope that readers would stay with me for the rest of the article, a former Canadian Prime Minister's Office spokesman committed this on the CBC website:

"In a bid to avoid becoming an afterthought in the wake of Tom Mulcair's psephological onslaught, Justin Trudeau has thrown down a thick tranche of "transformational" measures to make politics more accountable."

Not surprisingly, this immediately caused a spike in lookups of "psephological" on the Merriam-Webster dictionary site.

"Psephological" (pronounced "seffa LOGICAL" or "seefa LOGICAL") means "concerning voting statistics and trends, or the analysis of these." and is derived from "psephology" ("sif OLLA gee" or "see FOLLA gee"), the prediction of electoral results based on analysis of sample polls, voting patterns, etc.

Where does this weird word come from?

In ancient Greek, a psephos was a pebble, and since pebbles were used in casting ballots, the prefix "psepho-" came to apply to voting. In ancient Greece, a "psephism" was a decree enacted by an elected assembly. 

The word "psephology" was coined in 1952.

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