See my preamble for this exercise and analysis of each of the policy questions here: 2019 CBC Vote Compass Analysis.
First things first, let’s tally up the questions based on whether they simply ask for a policy position (good/OK), whether they could use more information for context (bad), or whether they’re based on an extremely racist proposal (awful).
Good Questions: [2, 5, 6, 25, 26]
OK Questions: [8, 9, 10, 13, 14, 15, 21, 24, 27, 29, 30]
Bad Questions: [1, 3, 4, 7, 11, 12, 16, 18, 19, 20, 22, 28]
Awful Questions: [17, 23, 31&32]
By my count, that’s 5 good questions, 11 that are OK but could probably use more context, and another 12 that are just bad. Overall, in my opinion, that is just not a great ratio, never mind the 4 outright awful questions.
These bad (not awful) questions usually involve asking whether voters support ‘more’ of something without ever saying what the current state of the policy is. These kinds of questions allow me to give truly unhelpful answers, unless I happen to already know a ton about the topic already.
There are also a bunch of bad questions, mostly having to do with racist or bigoted views, and it’s really unfortunate we’re at a point in politics where we need to ask if Canada of all places should admit more immigrants.
The good and OK questions from the survey all describe a policy relatively clearly, but the OK ones could definitely use some extra links on the page for information in case voters want to inform themselves before deciding what they think about a policy.
I find the Vote Compass quite accurate most of the time for me, but I’m not sure everybody else feels that way, and given the large number of people who actually use it (over a million in this election), adding some context to the questions would probably go a long way towards informing voters!
Anyways, thanks for reading, and get out on the 21st and vote!
