I'm not trying to be snarky or mean, but how is organizing the candidates' professed stands going to help?
Thanks for your feedback! Actually we get data from a lot of sources, not just candidates' own statements. One source is interest group ratings, which is an imperfect but still decent proxy for voting record. We are also in the midst of developing a crowd-sourced component where people can leave citations that shed light on a candidate's real position. Finally, we are doing research into predicting candidate positions based on donations. There is research out there showing a correlation between donors and voting behavior, so there is a good theoretical basis to make that work. We hope that all these data sources will act as a check on candidates' professed views.
Those sites already exist. Who reads them?
There are sites out there that catalog candidate votes, but none of them feed that data into a dating-style matching algorithm. Part of why no one reads them is that it would take forever to learn anything. It's like reading the phone book. Our approach is to let you say what you believe, and then we apply all that candidate data to infer how compatible you'd be.
Of course we can't be a panacea for all democracy's woes, but I do hope our project will let people vote, volunteer, and donate in a more targeted way. If we succeed, we could improve people's optimism about their vote and increase candidate accountability. Especially for state and local elections, it doesn't take much to sway an outcome.
This plan sounds a lot like what we're trying to accomplish at ElectNext.com, although we don't want to be a fourth branch of government. We are building a database of candidate profiles so we can match voters to the candidates who would best represent them. We also let people debate the issues in a community-moderated forum like StackOverflow or Quora. We're just getting started, so I'd love whatever feedback people have to offer.
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I'm not trying to be snarky or mean, but how is organizing the candidates' professed stands going to help?
Thanks for your feedback! Actually we get data from a lot of sources, not just candidates' own statements. One source is interest group ratings, which is an imperfect but still decent proxy for voting record. We are also in the midst of developing a crowd-sourced component where people can leave citations that shed light on a candidate's real position. Finally, we are doing research into predicting candidate positions based on donations. There is research out there showing a correlation between donors and voting behavior, so there is a good theoretical basis to make that work. We hope that all these data sources will act as a check on candidates' professed views.
Those sites already exist. Who reads them?
There are sites out there that catalog candidate votes, but none of them feed that data into a dating-style matching algorithm. Part of why no one reads them is that it would take forever to learn anything. It's like reading the phone book. Our approach is to let you say what you believe, and then we apply all that candidate data to infer how compatible you'd be.
Of course we can't be a panacea for all democracy's woes, but I do hope our project will let people vote, volunteer, and donate in a more targeted way. If we succeed, we could improve people's optimism about their vote and increase candidate accountability. Especially for state and local elections, it doesn't take much to sway an outcome.
This plan sounds a lot like what we're trying to accomplish at ElectNext.com, although we don't want to be a fourth branch of government. We are building a database of candidate profiles so we can match voters to the candidates who would best represent them. We also let people debate the issues in a community-moderated forum like StackOverflow or Quora. We're just getting started, so I'd love whatever feedback people have to offer.