To accompany the last presidential debate, I ask a question:
Who to vote for?
It’s not just about what party you’re affiliated with, who you agree with more on an issue or which candidate you understand better… it’s a combination of them all. It’s more important how a candidate can handle the different issues facing us today than how they perform in a debate or advertisement.
There should be somewhere to assign a weight to each issue on the table and then issue by issue see which candidate I agree more with. Then it would calculate and tell me who I really support according to how I prioritize the issues. So if I think the only issue worth voting about is Iraq or the economy and I agree more with Barrack Obama or John McCain on those issues it will be reflect in the results.
It’s pretty hard to explain the whole idea, without building it myself, so that’s just what I did… while I couldn’t stop thinking about it I coded it.
Check it out, and I hope it helps! Cause we’re gonna need all the help we can get on this one! It can help you decide or just test yourself and see if you really support that candidate as much as you think.
I pulled info from CNN’s election center mostly because all the info was gathered for me already, each of the big issues, descriptions and the candidates position. I have a slider for each issue where users select how imortant it is to them (on a scale of 0 to 100 percent). Then users compare their own position on the issues with each candidate (on a scale of 0 to 100 toward each candidate). This is all considered while your support is calculated. Each issue’s importance as a percentage is multiplied by the amount you agree with each candidates position. These are all added up and totaled to give a final percentage. This is innovative in that it’s not just who you agree with mpre, it’s who you agree with more on the isues that you think are more important! Let me know what you think about this and let the candidates know what you think about their positions.
Voters Aide the flash app to help you decide who you support by letting you prioritize the issues and choose which candidate you lean towards on each issue and see the overall results.
One Comment
I think it’s a crying shame that once again I as a lot of other citizens don’t really get to vote for someone as much as we got to vote against someone. Both selections are really (in my opion) bad choices. Neither one has answered the question that is more important to me. They both talk about helping the middle class, but John McCain doesn’t tell you his scaling for listing someone in the middle class. On the other hand B. Obama listing according to what I get from CNN is that Obamas’ classification appears to be someone making 60,000 dollars to 250,000 dollars. Well I live in Oklahoma and my pay scale isn’t close to 60,000 a year it is much less. So does this put me in the lower class? According to Obamas’ scaling it does, so my question is what about us lower class farmers and workers in the middle of the U.S.? Heck when everyone was screaming on both coast-where the average income is over 60,000 a year-about gas prices what about use in central U.S. where the average income is no where near the 60,000 dollar mark?
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[...] sliders as a form of user input, such as a volume control in my video player, or the inputs for my Voter’s Aide app that let users assign value to issues in the 2008 presidential election. I figured I’d just [...]