McMaster professor innovates public polling with new app
- Bennett Swan
- 18 Nov 2019
In light of Canada’s recent federal election, and in midst of political campaigning in the United States, questions surrounding polling accuracy have arisen once again.
Public opinion is an incredibly difficult thing to quantify. To be completely accurate, you would need full participation from the population and you would need the polling to be done by a neutral third party. Bad polling can lead to inaccurate representations of public opinion and lead the population astray.
Political scientist and McMaster University professor, Clifton van der Linden, has made this very issue the focus of his continued research.
With the help of Vox Pop Labs and the CBC, van der Linden has created an app called “Vote Compass” to help assist voters figure out where they lay on the political spectrum.
The app asks a series of questions on subjects such as environment and immigration and compares those answers with the policies of the different parties. It then points the user in the direction of the party which fits closest with their values.
The ballots are being tallied, but one count is already in. @VoteCompass was used nearly 1.9 million times during the #elxn43 campaign.
Grateful for the incredible efforts of my colleagues at @VoxPopLabs, our partners @CBCNews and @iciradiocanada, and supporters at @CLESSN_UL.
— Clifton van der Linden (@CliffvdLinden) October 22, 2019
Over the past 8 years, millions of people across Canada and half a dozen other countries have used Vote Compass to evaluate their political opinions, and in the process a substantial amount of data has been collected on public opinion.
With this data, van der Linden is set to open a Centre for Digital Democracy at McMaster’s L.R. Wilson Hall in 2020. The aim of this centre would be to accurately evaluate this data, and draw useful conclusions on public opinion.
The genius of this application comes not necessarily in the polling technique, but more so in the medium and method in which the data is collected. Where a typical poll may only service 1000 people and draw information from that, the Vote Compass services several hundreds of thousands of citizens.
Van der Linden acknowledges that there is a lot at stake with this innovation. Polling has a serious effect on the voter, and accurate information is reliant on accurate and honest answers from the pollsters.
Ultimately, the hope is that this Centre for Digital Democracy can develop algorithms to draw accurate conclusions and allow the general public to have more accurate voting information.
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