Apparently on Wednesday, the people of the Netherlands voted in their parliamentary elections. That on its own is blog-worthy, but what I found interesting is that over half of the voters used a web based voter guide to help them make their selections.
The voter guide is called VoteMatch (StemWijzer) and was provided by the Institute For The Public and Politics. IPP has also kindly provided an English version, so the curious non-Dutch speakers of the world can review the guide.
In my brief review of this guide and the news article about it, I discovered a few interesting bits of information:
- All the political parties were each allowed to submit their own questions for inclusion in the guide and all the political parties who did so endorsed the use of this guide.
- Some people in the Netherlands, attribute the shift of members of parliament to the extremes of the left right voters axis, to the use of this guide
- Some voters received conflicting recommendations: One of their top choices would be for a party on the left and the other for a part on the right.
- More voters turned out because of this guide
I do find it scary though that voter choice can be reduced to a few simple questions, but I also think anything which increases voter turn out is a good thing. I can't wait to see how such a guide will influence elections here in Canada.
What do you think of voter guides being adopted en mass by the voting public?
4 comments:
Interesting quote of the day, PT.
Not much of my doing, as I use a script to automatically retrieve the quote of the day, as selected by QuoteDB.
But I do agree it is an interesting quote, one I am familiar with from many years ago.
i am against this. big time. in the same way i am against mandatory voting laws in austrailia. uninformed voters at the ballot box equals bad news for democracy. voting should be hard.
Can voters get anymore uninformed?
Is the use of a voter guide any worse than determining who to vote for based on what your union or congregation says is best?
I don't think stopping free speech and the right to associate in this instance will benefit democracy.
How would you go about stopping interactive and regular voter guides from being used?
I believe most voters are too uninformed and stupid to actually make an informed choice on election day. At the same time I see no way of limiting stupid people from making stupid choices for the rest of us.
Thankfully if a person is too stupid, they just stay home and don't vote. So democracy only has to contend with the sort of stupid people making choices for the rest of us.
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