Candidate Map (Ehdokaskartta) is a prototype, open-source web app that helps voters find a suitable electoral candidate. It serves as the first step towards creating a fully-fledged open-source framework for Voting Advice Applications, tentatively dubbed OpenVAA.
Since Yle’s pioneering 1996 Election Compass, VAAs or Voting Advice Applications have come to play an important role in elections, especially in polities with a fragmented party system. Their main purpose is most often to try and match the voter with suitable candidates or parties based on an opinion questionnaire, which both the candidates and the voter fill.
As befits their increasing uptake, a substantial body of research has also been published regarding VAAs. The literature sheds light on several tricky and interesting issues concerning VAAs. These learnings coupled with Yle’s hope for a less text-based interface served as the basis for the project.
Naturally, only a subset of the identified issues could be addressed and it scarcely is feasible to construct one VAA that could deal with all of those. Rather, and appositely for the domain of democracy, a plurality of VAAs with different approaches probably is the right answer. The purpose of the prototype is, thus, to test novel solutions to some of the concerns, especially:
- Presenting the candidates on a 2-dimensional map instead of a list
- Making inputting answers less rigid and less tedious for the voter
- Allowing further filtering of the candidates
- Incorporating party averages into the results
- Assuming a mobile-first approach
- Facilitating studying the political landscape in general
The app uses Google’s Angular library and Material Design components. The source code is available on Github, where the motivations for pursuing an open-source approach are presented in more detail.
You can try Ehdokaskartta out (in Finnish) at ehdokaskartta.fi. An in-depth discussion (only in Finnish as of now) about the solutions offered and their shortcoming can be found at ehdokaskartta.fi/about.
