ABC Vote Compass draws 270,000 responses in first 36 hours
An new online voter survey ABC Vote Compass created by the ABC has received more than 270,000 responses since being launched immediately after the announcement of the election date.
According to the public broadcaster, the online tool is the biggest survey of voter attitudes that has ever been undertaken in Australia.
It was developed by a non-profit group of political scientists and through a short series of questions aims to show voters how they fit in the Australian political landscape.
“Too often Australian elections focus only on the daily movements of party leaders, with breathless reporting of brief statements carefully crafted for television,” said Antony Green, ABC election analyst.
“In modern stage-managed campaigns we see little real discussion of party policy. With Vote Compass we will be providing voters with a new method of engaging with the policy debate. We hope to use the data gathered to provide in-depth analysis of the views of Australian voters, using a different source of data than traditional opinion polls.”
Once users answer 30 questions on a range of policy areas they are shown a Vote Compass that compares their answers with the policy positions of the major political parties and displays their position on a grid, plotting where the voter stands in the overall Australian political landscape.
The ABC says it will take this anonymous data as a snapshot, to identify the key policy issues that matter to Australian voters and then report the findings as part of the ABC’s overall election coverage.
The Voter Compass is already being integrated into the public broadcaster’s news coverage with the site featuring in last night’s news.
Nic Christensen
I couldn’t log on, too much traffic, the ABC was flogging it to death though on their news programs.
Seemed the copper network failed.
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System would not let me in…no matter what I did.
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I like the logo. I’m sure that helped with their success. Quality logos are important!
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I just used it now and it’s really impressive. It was used in Canada and the US to great effect so hopefully it helps people cut through the crap in the upcoming election!
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The survey didn’t have ‘I prefer not to say’ answers for sensitive questions like income and education. When this happens, I simply choose the most nothing answer possible. I don’t trust data to anonymous sources. Hell, I don’t even trust it with anyone.
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I just used it…it’s awesome. Get involved y’all
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I got mine through after waiting a little while before submitting my form, I found the results interesting as well as somewhat of a surprise to find out which party was closest to my responses.
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Thought it was terrific. Not only allowed me to see how close my views were to the parties, but how the parties answers compared to mine. Love to have a button to press allowing you to see the percentage answers to see what the nation is thinking.
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Imo the vote compass is biased, I show up as being aligned with the Green’s and I can tell you now that I would be their worst nightmare.
I want coal fired power stations, I want dams and I don’t want a price on carbon, I’m not interested in fighting climate change but I am interested in how we will adapt to it.
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Vote Compass is NOT a survey on the ABC website. It’s a program run by a totally separate group that the ABC has embedded code from on their site, and that group is collecting a whole lotta data about everyone who uses it. Theoretically they don’t identify individuals, but in practice they could. Certainly the ABC’s privacy policy isn’t worth a row of beans on this.
If you are happy to give all that personal information away for free – and that someone else can use if for whatever they want including onselling it – then that’s fine. But I’m not.
This site explains how it works much better than I can.
http://www.zdnet.com/yes-senat.....000018951/
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I vote for labor because Kevin Rudd has delivered some achevements in 2009
Pension increase of %54.00 afortnight.
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Seems like 100,000 people were able to use the system between when I first tried and when I last tried, but I ain’t one of them, unless it counts people who selected a postcode or electorate and then sat there waiting for a response of some kind. Even a “if you see nothing in 15 seconds press here” or “have you got security settings set to xyz”. Just nothing? not good enough.
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This is a biased survey. and my results were ridiculous and way off what I will vote.
It must be a scam on getting you to think that you should vote for the Greens if you don’t agree with Labor or Coaliton toxic “me too” policies.
This survey selection does not include the Palmer United Party as one of the voting options .Palmer United has more candidates running for Lower House and Senate selection than the Coalition. Biased limited options only result in a rigged outcome!
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Another reject from the Votecompass website. As older people our software is apparently antedeluvian compared to theirs. We couldn’t even access the questionnaire. So much for the statistics parrotted by the ABC if people like us are discriminated against
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