Next 14 and 21 March, French will vote for Regional elections. Few weeks before the election day, many people wonder for who they will vote, and even if they will go to the polling place. If they can bet on results with a website like Predipol, they don't have a French "voting navigator", such as "EuProfiler", awarded by the e-Democracy Forum Award 2009. Its designers had explained how it had been difficult to compile the views of some 300 political parties at European level to help citizens to distinguish the positions. In Germany, voters of North Rhine-Westphalia can use a similar system before their regional election, in May."Wahl-O-Mat" was created in 2002 by the very official "Bundespolitische Zentrale für Bildung".
The concept of "voting navigators" is mainly a web-based tool to provide an easy overview of parties, politicians ans their programs. The idea is not to tell the voter how to vote, but to offer quick access to information helping the user to distinguish between the positions of the parties. Their goal is to increase voter turnout and to find new, innovative ways of motivating people to use their right to vote.
Over 6 million page views were recorded on the website during German General election last year. 24 of the 27 Parties had responded to 87 questions on the main campaign themes. For each question parties should only respond "agree / neutral / disagree". Then voters could answer and compare their results to see what party they were the closest. A team of 21 people had worked on the questionnaire.According to the "Modern Democracy" magazine, about 20 voting navigators exist in USA, Israel and Europe (Austria, Belgium, Czech Republic, Germany, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovakia, Switzerland, United Kingdom)
- Presentation of EUProfiler during the last eDemocracy Forum
- The Wahl-o-mat website
- French Regional elections
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