Do online voter tools work?
Posted October 8, 2015 7:53 am.
This article is more than 5 years old.
VANCOUVER (NEWS 1130) – After months of campaigning, are you any closer to knowing who you’ll vote for on October 19th?
Judging by the swings in the polls, many people are having trouble nailing down which party they’ll be supporting on election day.
There are a number of online tools meant to help voters make a decision, but there is some debate over whether they actually work as well as they’re supposed to.
“Anecdotally, I’ve had some very interesting responses from people who said they took it and it turns out they support a party that they don’t actually support,” says Dennis Pilon, a political science professor at York University. “So there appears to be some ‘wild card’ aspect to how these attempts work.”
Pilon says there is a reason sites like “ISideWith…” are becoming more popular — some voters have trouble placing the parties correctly on the left-right spectrum.
“But there is one thing voters are good at: knowing what issues they feel strongly about.”
After answering a number of questions on some of what Pilon calls the “classic” issues, the websites direct voters to the party that is closest to their position on those issues.
So, are they a useful tool?
“My clear answer is… maybe,” Pilon tells NEWS 1130.
“It really depends on the quality of the question and the assumptions of the people who designed them. Sometimes these instruments can go wrong if the designers haven’t thought all the potential ways in which voters can interpret the questions. We often run into these problems on issues that don’t fall neatly across the left-right divide.”
Pilon’s advice is to only use an online voter tool as part of a larger arsenal.
“Voters should use as many different strategies as they can. If nothing else, answering the questions in these sites — how they feel about military involvement in Iraq, whether or not they support assisted suicide, whether or not women with veils have to take them off at citizenship ceremonies — all of these questions are good for voters to think about,” he explains.
“Even if they don’t agree with the party that the website says they should vote for, someone answering these questions will at least have thought more about where they fall on some of these issues.”
And Pilon says that can only be a good thing.
