* Voter Advice Applications.
I have been drawing your attention to a number of websites which either tell you who the candidates are in your constituency or help you to decide who to vote for, such as Unlock Democracy’s VoteMatch.
MySociety has produced a list of the latter types under the snappy title: A list of Voter Advice Applications – AKA ‘who should I vote for?’ tools – for the UK General Election. It lists a dozen or so sites, and others are mentioned in the comments.
Now although it is comforting to prove that you think like a Lib Dem, these sites are not really targeted at the readers of political blogs, who can work out for themselves where their loyalties lie. But they can be useful on the doorstep; if you meet a voter who appears to back Lib Dem policies but is not convinced by our rhetoric, then the evidence from an independent site might persuade them to vote for us.
* Mary Reid is a contributing editor on Lib Dem Voice. She was a councillor in Kingston upon Thames, where she is still very active with the local party, and is the Hon President of Kingston Lib Dems.
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6 Comments
“Now although it is comforting to prove that you think like a Lib Dem..”
I just took the Vote Match test and the Lib Dems came in as my 3rd choice. Good job I don’t have a Welsh or Scottish postcode, or it might have been worse. I assume the results are based on Coalition policies rather than the Lib Dem manifestos, but even so….
As I consider myself left-of-centre I would be careful using these on the doorstep, unless faced with a wavering soft Tory voter.
It turns out I’m “Green” still it could’ve been worse…
So, I come out as Green, 2nd choice LibDem. But in in our electoral system, so what? The true options are between the two largest groups in your constituency, and they don’t ask that; you’d probably need to be a bit of a political nerd to know.
I therefore have the choice between Germy Hunt and our excellent LD candidate Patrick Haveron. We might win.
I do not know about the others, but ‘Vote For Policies’ was updated last week with the release of the manifestos.
It also gives you the actual policies from each party (anonymised until the end) rather than asking general questions along the lines of “Do you support X?”, so it is much less reliant on the interpretation of the parties’ positions by the VAA and you can go back and make more sense of your results.
I did one of these – I can’t remember which – and it gave me the fairly comforting result in order LibDem, Green, Labour, Tory. UKIP.
I just did “Vote for Policies”. I’m 70% Liberal Democrat and 30% Green. It was instructive how often I was selecting a shortlist of party policies on a particular topic and I had three worth considering and two rejected – and I was pretty sure I’d selected Lib Dem + Labour + Green and rejected Tory and UKIP. Worth mulling over, and sometimes only familiar flagship Lib Dem policies or familiar Labour language about the Government told me which was which. But forced to select one out of five, ten times I chose Lib Dem or Green and never Labour, even though in about half the cases I didn’t know which was Labour.