Check your voting direction with Vote Compass

Within only a few days of launching, Vote Compass, a project by the ABC and the University of Melbourne, has had more than 26,000 responses and 4,500 tweets. Questions about support for the East-West tunnel, laws around access to abortion and the legality of marijuana help set a voter's electoral co-ordinates.

Q: What is Vote Compass?

Aaron Martin: It’s an educational tool developed by a non-profit group of political scientists and hosted by the ABC in partnership with Election Watch/University of Melbourne. It made its Australian debut for the 2013 Federal Election and was spectacularly successful – there were over 1 million completions of the survey. This is only the second time the tool has been used in an Australian election.

Based on an individual’s responses to a brief questionnaire, Vote Compass generates an analysis of how your views compare to the positions of the candidates in a given election.

This analysis is restricted to the specific issues included in the Vote Compass questionnaire and may not necessarily reflect perceived political affiliation or intended vote choice.

The thing we would like to emphasize is that it isn’t a vote calculator – we are not telling people how to vote. Its chief purpose is to inform people where the parties stand on issues. These days it can be easy for people to get lost in the minutiae of personality politics. So this project helps them – if they choose – to dig into where the parties stand on the issues that matter to them.

Q: So how do I use it?

There are different levels of engagement – it’s really up to you how deep you go. You might just choose to complete the survey of basic questions, which maybe will take you as little as 10 minutes, and will then tell you how your views sit in relation to those of the various parties and their platforms.

Or, if you choose, you can really drill down into the issues and explore the detail of the different policies. We’ve got quotes from all the parties on their positions on various issues.

In the questionnaire we have tried to capture the broad range of issues people think are important – education, health, roads, social policy, environment. We’ve done this by consultation with experts and by inviting public input over the past few months – using social media to reach voters and have them tell us what is on their radar.

Q: What do the politicians and parties think of this exercise? How do you ensure it fairly represents their platforms?

It’s a very careful and rigorous process. We calibrated the parties on all the different selected questions. After identifying about 30 key questions we have then gone to the parties and said ‘are you happy with how we have ranked you, represented you’ – and so there has been input by the parties at that stage. It has been a fair and transparent dialogue. Mostly they agree with how we position them, and where they don’t we have pulled together some rigorous evidence to justify where we have put them on the scale.

www.abc.net.au/news/vic-election-2014/vote-compass/