ABC Vote Compass passes 1.1 million responses
The ABC’s online voter survey ABC Vote Compass has received more than 1m responses in the four and half weeks since it launched.
The public broadcaster said the insights on voter attitudes had been informing its election coverage in a number of areas.
“We can’t say it matches precisely one million unique users” said Gillian Bradford, ABC federal election producer, “but it has brought a richness and depth to the coverage which we wouldn’t have otherwise have had.”
“Australians are bombarded with polls and I think this is a depth beyond the polls because we are talking about voter attitudes, something we rarely see.”
Among the projects the Vote Compass has allowed the ABC to conduct is a mapping of voter attitudes by issue. Some of the issues already mapped include: asylum seekers, taxation, foreign aid and the republic.
Election analyst Antony Green has also done reports on the individual issues that concern voters and what impact this may have on the results, based on demographics.
“It has allowed us to dig into it on an electorate by electorate level, so it is a true broad survey of voter attitudes”, said Bradford.
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The company behind the Vote Compass, a non-profit group of political scientists, have also mapped Twitter interactions on the #auspol hashtag in a map which appears to show the political spectrum of some of Australia’s most prominent tweeters.
Bradford said the dataset would not be complete until election day and that the ABC would continue to draw data out of the resource.
“We do intend to continue producing reports (from the data) after the election because we haven’t done a full readout and can’t until we have the full data set after the election.””Once we hit that critical mass we will crunch all that data and try to map Australia electorate by electorate, according to all the questions contained in the survey and produce an nation wide map.”
Nic Christensen
I used the Vote Compass last night. It’s very impressive.
A lot of brands and agencies talk a big game around offering utility to consumers. This example delivers big time. 1,100,000 responses is amazing.
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Brilliant – but the results surprised a lot of people…
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Of all the media operators, ABC “get” digital the best – Vote Compass is yet further proof. Pity they are all left-wing tree-hugging hippy commos according to the trolls. Keep up the good work.
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I was most disturbed at the way Vote Compass asked its questions then used the answers to skew results. If you ask if a certain topic is important to you, but don’t give any means of identifying why it is important (eg, in a positive or negative way), it’s a stupid question.
At the end, it told me I was 30% in agreement with the Greens, Like bloody hell. Me, supporting Madam Pruneface and Sarah Hyphen-Hyphen even 0.3%? You gotta be kidding!
If you ask questions certain ways, you can easily get the answers you want – just ask pollsters and radio ratings surveys!
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Best on line game ever! I played 5 times and loved every one.
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Yes, BUT….
It doesn’t stop repeated inputs – a cookie-clearance and off you go again. That’s to say the trends are easily skewed by activist groups who want to see a particular viewpoint appear to be popular.
And they do. They email members asking people to each do 20-50 inputs to “prove” a point. Engaging, but the trends can’t be trusted.
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