If you follow politics, you may already have heard the name SmartVote. It’s been dubbed “the Tinder for politics” and the title has stuck. It’s a website that was made in cooperation with the Union of Students in Ireland (USI) to make information on candidates more easily accessible to people who wouldn’t otherwise vote – targeting young people.
So how does it work? You go to www.smartvote.ie and type in your town or street, and it finds which electoral constituency you are in. The website then offers you 30 questions. Each time you answer with “Disagree”, “Agree” or “Neither agree nor disagree”, represented by a thumbs up, a thumbs down and a neat yellow double-arrow, respectively. Interestingly, you can also give gradations to your answer (“strongly agree” or “somewhat agree”), although the website doesn’t explain how the algorithm takes these into account or whether it takes them into account at all. Presumably, each gradation between your answer and the candidate’s answer removes a point off their final score, but it’s hard to tell for sure. Because of the yes/no aspect of the questions, they are very quickly answered. Once you are finished, the website gives all the candidates a score and ranks them.
The candidates are given the opportunity to change their answers, but most of them stuck to the party line or didn’t respond to the emails.
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However, it’s not as accurate as you’d hope. Leo Varadkar did the test and ranked himself as ninth. One reason for this seemingly absurd result is that the questions were not answered by candidates in a coherent way: some were answered by email from specific individuals, others were inferred from candidate or party manifestos. Therefore, most Fine Gael candidates show up as “neither agree nor disagree” to over two thirds of the questions and lose points accordingly. The candidates are given the opportunity to change their answers, but most of them stuck to the party line or didn’t respond to the emails. Why? It’s partly because of the nature of the questions chosen and partly because some of the parties didn’t want to take positions before they created their manifesto. The statements that they are asked to respond to include “Ireland should increase its corporate tax rate to increase investment in public services” and “Investment in rail and tramlines over buses is the best long term solution for transport in Ireland”, which are very specific and difficult for parties to answer.
The other reason the questionnaire can’t be perfect is that the election is shaping itself around what have been termed “credibility issues”. What’s important is not what government should do but who the voters will trust to do it. At the USI hustings, Sinn Féin and the Anti-Austerity Alliance repeatedly reminded the audience that Labour signed a pledge in Trinity which they broke once in power. Senator Gerard Craughwell said: “manifestos aren’t worth the paper they’re written on if they’re going to get ripped to shreds during coalition negotiations.” Sinn Féin are against water charges in the Republic of Ireland, but have defended them in Northern Ireland. Some parties gain points in SmartVote because they champion popular issues – free education, more public transport – but rely on budgets clearly within the realm of fantasy to enact them. Questions you need to ask on top of those offered go along the lines of “based on their track record, do I trust them to keep their promises?” and “who do I trust to keep the recovery going?”
You can determine which candidates agree with you on the issues most important to you, you can compare your results to those of any given candidate, and you can inform yourself as to what each party stands for.
So is it worth taking the test? I would definitely say yes. Clicking on each candidate or sorting the results by question is where the site’s true value is. You can determine which candidates agree with you on the issues most important to you, you can compare your results to those of any given candidate, and you can inform yourself as to what each party stands for. The candidates that actually filled out their own answers have the opportunity to give their reasoning for their choices, and I’ll admit that reading those led me to change my mind on some issues or at the very least pushed me to evaluate whether they were important and relevant to me.
SmartVote is a goldmine of information that would have taken too many hustings and town meetings to obtain. No matter whether you spend five minutes or 50 minutes on the site, it is worth your time.
There is still a shockingly high number of people who don’t know what the different parties stand for, and there is a lack of information as to what each candidate has or hasn’t done in office. The role of a TD is to write, amend and vote on legislation, but the attendance, participation and voting statistics of the Dáil are unreadable and require navigating law by law instead of candidate by candidate. SmartVote offers a more accessible way to learn about the candidates. While it is not ideal, it may encourage greater accountability in future, something which can only be heralded as a positive move.
