In the event you’re in too much of a hurry to check out the presidential candidates yourself, the Internet can now do it for you.
Connect2Elect is a new website that lets users add candidate attributes and issue positions that are important to them, and see who they should vote on. Issues are broken down by social (abortion, gay marriage, stem cell research), political (Iraq war, taxes, immigration) and core beliefs (welfare, gun rights). Clearly there is some overlap and room to argue over categorization, but the basic idea is that you click on issues that matter to you and order them. You then see a results screen with candidate values mapped to your own. Voila! You know who to vote for.
Overall I think the service is well executed (it was built by introNetworks, a white label social network startup). But it strikes me as somewhat lame to choose a candidate based only on their official policies, which reflect little more than current popular opinion.
In related stuff, see our recent coverage of PoliticalBase, a new database driven startup around candidates and issues, and let us know what questions you’d like us to ask in our upcoming podcast discussion with Mitt Romney, a republican candidate for president.
You gotta login? WTF is the point of that? Sites like these are a dime a dozen and none of them require you to login
I hope people vote on grounds stronger than what a website or a MySpace poll widget tells them to vote for!
By the way - awesome work in getting the Romney podcast. I would be great to see more political candidates follow
These sites would be great if people in the south or rural areas had better access to them. Unfortunately, those of use that do use them generally have an idea on the candidates and issues.
Too many people vote based on what their television tells them.
Nice look and feel, but I still prefer http://www.MyElectionChoices.com. The UI isn’t as slick, but it uses actual quotes from the candidates to help guide you.
dois it tell me how to get to site without goiing thru crunchbase?
6 total links, 5 techcrunch - low percenbtage - i want a recount
I tried it out and I would say it is not very accurate at all, it said I was most similar in my views to Duncan Hunter, someone who I disagree with about 99%.
In Switzerland we have smartvote (http://www.smartvote.ch) a sophisticated system, where the candidates themselves fill out the same questionnaire as the voters.
over 85% of all the candidates filled out their questionnaire and over 500k election propositions were made with the system, being roughly 25% ! of all the votes cast. so we have a system that every 4th voter uses to determine who to elect ( a bit more complex over here, since we have about 13 parties fighting for seats in parliament)
It will be interesting to see if the US can find a system that requires candidates to answer questions. this will allow voters to EXACTLY pinpoint how candidates stand to specific questions. candidates are forced to answer questions.
and if a candidate does not answer the questions, he will not pop up in the recommendations. in Switzerland, this can be fatal.
Damn… People lose their million dollar homes. I saw my friend had million dollar home. Now, he’s living abandon apartment.
People in California. Their million dollar home is gone due to fire.
This is where i do my shameless pitch…
If you want a startup where you will be able to do the research and really talk about politics and the upcoming elections, check out http://www.20dc.com. We’re just getting rolling with our official launch last week and we are open arms to all suggestions for improvement. We have a good handful of starting features and will be adding loads more between now and March. Come by and check us out!
I think that’s the first app I’ve really been impressed by in a while.
Way too many required fields for reg. And their privacy policy seems very weak….
I’m not going to bother signing up, but if they’re basing their choices on what any politician *says* then that’s a bit of a red flag. For instance, I’ve seen a few people lately thinking Huckabee would oppose IllegalImmigration based on his current statements. However, he has a long history of supporting it. Rudy says he’ll completely stop it, something that would sound good to many but would involve tradeoffs many wouldn’t be willing to make if they knew more. It’s also so completely impossible it’s one of the biggest unquestioned lies of the race so far. Perhaps they should add a “for amusement only” sticker.
Yes. The login kills the viral fun this site had the potential for…
This web site is not about giving advice — instead it’s all about collecting preference and demographic information. According to their privacy policy:
“This information will be used to allow our partners to analyze political data by category or in aggregate, for the purposes of evaluating demographic stances or anticipating behaviors. Further, the data will be used to monitor website traffic and other statistics. Additionally, the data may be used to invite future participation in relevant activities.”
Sounds to me like they’re collecting e-mail addresses to sell to political campaigns.
Web 2.0 for people who are too dumb to make their own decisions.
Surrender you freedom to Web 2.0. It will choose for you.
Bad idea. Just what America needs, a president elected on the basis of a web service. If you need someone to tell you who to vote for, you shouldn’t be voting in the first place. Next thing we’ll see is the presidential candidates paying tonnes of money to companies like that to sway voters (if it hasn’t already been done).
Excellent app but the login is crap and like many others say, It seems they just want marketing information.
Hello from C2E! Great comments around here and just to let you know, we are reading them and paying attention to your concerns. First, let me say we are NOT selling your personal info to solicitors. We are however, keeping an eye on general demographic trends. No need for Big Brother theories, we’re just a tech company sharing our tools with the public. Check the blog for more privacy info: http://blog.connect2elect.com/. Also, we don’t intend to make C2E the absolute source for your voting decision, just a starting point to your 08 research. Hope that helps!
The Foo, what is the alternative? Vote based on who your news paper or news channel tell you to vote for?
And I don’t think it is crazy to vote based on peeps stances on issues. While a lot of these do change based on current oppinion, etc, a lot of them don’t. Most important for me is to have someone in office who is intelligent and open minded. After that, I want someone who has the same beliefs as me on the major issues. What else are we voting on?
I think this site would be most useful at the local level where political coverage is lacking. I go through this same process by hand every election, and it takes a while just to find out who the candidates are in the races I’ll be voting in.
I’ve been really waiting for a site like this. I’ll be sure to check out the other sites listed in the comments.
@Jason
That is exactly my point … you don’t vote because someone tells you it is good to vote for him or her — that defeats the purpose of why you vote in the first place. it really doesn’t matter whether it is this site, newspaper, news channel, a mega star or the nobel prize winner tells you its good. Decide for yourself, by yourself and with YOUR own opinion — not because you are influenced by a particular person, site or media outlet.
my thing about it is if you need be told who is the ideal candidate, you shouldn’t be voting in the first place. i think voting for someone should be more than just choosing your issues online, then matching the ones that is closest to the ideal. it should also be much more than choosing a candidate that says what the public wants to hear, based on their official policies and popular opinions. take in the facts, process it and form your own opinion but for goodness sake don’t allow a site to crank out a so called leader based on algorithms and calculations. These sort of systems are a serious injustice to the whole American system. Why not just let a machine tell you what to do, right? or better yet, let’s flip a coin.
What would stop the fictitious Homer Simpson (or your average Joe next door) from running for president, stating the best possible answer for health care, education, national security etc. and then this organization choosing Homer or Joe as the ideal candidate based on his so called best policies? Dumb Jack Blogs comes along, has to vote but doesn’t know who to vote for… gets on this website, finds out that Homer (of average Joe) is the ideal candidate and votes for him. With enough exposure and reach (which is not hard to do with money nowadays), this organization can start to manipulate votes real easily. All they have to do is get an A-list blogger to talk about it positively and it’ll start spreading like wildfire. This may be a silly/ extreme example but i think you get the picture of what i’m trying to paint.
The level of biasness of this company is impossible to measure — so we won’t know whether there are hidden agendas, whether this company was paid off by a presidential candidate’s party or funded by a rich source supporting a particular candidate to sway votes. My fear is that people will start using this site to more than what it is … to the extent of personal judgements being distorted/ clouded and where people can’t think for themselves.
It’s bad enough that the media plays a big part in swaying someone, you don’t need an organization like that (whom you don’t even know where its loyalty lies) to tell you who is ideal and who is not.
A very bad idea, I can’t even stand to imagine our American president being voted into office on the basis of an online organization saying that he (or she) is the most ideal.
Crazy. I had been thinking about launching something similar. Guess its a good thing I didn’t, I would have been second to the game.
I would like to alert you all to yet another website - http://www.Straight2theCandidates.com - that tries to help you pick your candidate but does so by communicating directly with them.
How? Register and start posting messages (written, audio and soon video) to your candidate(s) of choice. Then go and check out other people’s messages - those you can vote up or down.
What’s the difference to a direct email to your candidate? Other people can show their support for your message by voting for you! That means your message stands for many more people like you. On November 4, 2007 - one year from the elections - we will start sending the top questions of the week to the respective campaigns to be answered.
So check out http://www.Straight2theCandidates.com and vote for the questions you want answered.