In response to reports of diminished consumption of traditional news media by young adults and relatively poor levels of student participation in elections, we have developed a web site-based intervention and research program that will test information technology in different academic settings that will contribute, potentially, to more effective decision making by college student voters. The web site also offers adult voters and prospective voters help with their presidential election decision making.
MyElectionDecision is an interactive web site developed by a team of information scientists, web designers, psychologists, and political scientists at Lawrence University and the University of California, Irvine. The site provides policy statements by unnamed candidates and proposes to support prospective voters' decision-making by helping them rate the importance of different issues and assess their closeness to initially unnamed candidates' positions on a set of critical issues. Users receive a weighted score telling them which candidate they support.
The candidate statements used by MyElectionDecision.org are drawn largely from the official web sites of the various presidential candidates or in some cases from recent speeches. As such they are both very current and accurately capture what it is the candidate wishes to communicate to the public. That is to say, since the web sites are operated directly by the various election committees, they have a high degree of what political strategists have called "message control."
In many cases the policy statements are summaries of longer, more elaborate web-based policy positions. In such cases every effort has been made to preserve the language, tone and main points of the original statement. MyElectionDecision has vetted these summaries with a wide-range of people from diverse backgrounds who are not affiliated with the project. These preliminary accuracy tests have produced very high results, with every single test subject able to match the summary with the original statement. MyElectionDecision will continue to vet these summaries as candidates modify their positions, and we will continue to check reliability by having consultants verify how we have summarized these positions.
