“Our principal goal at Vote Compass is to give citizens a way to start a conversation about the election,” says Peter Loewen, a political science professor at UTM who led the academic team developing the project. “People lead busy lives, and politics are often not at the top of one's mind. ”
Essentially, Vote Compass offers a quick, easy, and engaging way for the average citizen to dive into the political discussion. Consisting of a 30 question survey in which you are asked to rate how much you agree or disagree with a variety of issues, Vote Compass compares your responses with those of the various parties. As well as indicating your political leanings as best as your handful of answers allows, the new Ontario provincial Vote Compass also now enables users to determine how well they relate to each party's platform on an issue by issue basis.
According to Clifton van der Linden, PhD Candidate in the Department of Political Science and both founder and executive director of the project, Vote Compass belongs to a family of VEAs or “Voter Engagement Applications,” which have existed in Europe for nearly a decade. “I was a visiting scholar with the Political Science Department at the Free University Amsterdam last year when the Dutch parliament fell,” says Clifton. “Some friends of mine introduced me to several VEAs that had been set up for the Dutch parliamentary elections, and I thought that they were a great way to promote electoral literacy and voter engagement.”
While the federal Vote Compass earlier this year was an overall success, it was not without its detractors. As of June 11, 2011, CBC’s Office of the Ombudsman received 76 emails from users with criticisms of the application, some of whom claimed that the federal Vote Compass possessed an inherent liberal-left bias. In response, CBC Ombudsman Kirk LaPointe conducted a review which concluded that while the CBC fulfilled its accuracy and fairness policies, nevertheless the way in which the application was presented to the public may have been misleading. “In some instances, users didn’t take note of the cautionary material and inferred this was an advice tool or a scientific poll — it was neither, as CBC made clear in its background information,” LaPointe’s review states.
When asked about the goals and intentions behind the Vote Compass project, Linden is keen to make sure that people understand the application is not telling them how to vote. “We did not intend Vote Compass to be used as a means of identifying or predicting one’s party affiliation,” continues Linden. “Vote Compass does not tell someone that they’re a Conservative or a Liberal, for example. It merely shows them, on a specific (i.e. not comprehensive) suite of issues, how their views stack up against the policy positions of the various parties.”
For Loewen especially, Vote Compass is about increasing citizen political competence. “While we might expect all citizens to be fully informed, that's idealistic at best,” he says. “First and foremost, Vote Compass is intended to help citizens start their investigation of the parties. ”
To try Vote Compass for yourself, visit http://votecompass.cbc.ca/en. The Ontario provincial election is on October 6.
