Vote Match has launched for the general election today and for the first time since the project started in 2008, my fingerprints aren’t all over it (declaration: I am of course married to the Unlock Democracy director, which is behind Vote Match). The design I built for the 2010 general election has been replaced by a much slicker and more modern design and I’m impressed by it.
It is a sign of Vote Match’s success that this year it is in a crowded marketplace for voter advice applications in the UK. There is Vote for Policies, I Side With, possibly Verto if they ever get it to work, and I’m sure there are several others that I haven’t come across yet. Imitation being the sincerest form of flattery, I couldn’t be happier or prouder to see so many people leaping on this particular bandwagon.
Not everyone agrees. Former Labour councillor and communications professional Antonia Bance has singled out VAAs for being misleading and “written by people who don’t understand politics”. The problem with them, she suggests, is that they indicate that all that matters about politics is policy. And I suppose that, taken literally, the name “Vote for Policies” does suggest that, and I certainly can’t claim to speak for everyone who has ever built a VAA.
But here’s the thing. Not a single VAA exists in a vacuum, and not a single voter relies solely on a VAA to decide which way to vote. There certainly is a problem; the RegistHER campaign are quoting stats today suggesting that 28% of people don’t know anything about Conservative policies, 41% about Labour policies and 62% about Lib Dem policies. None of these stats tell us anything we don’t already know: a huge proportion of the voting public don’t even know where to begin where to vote.
But it is the height of condescension to suggest that anyone will jump on a VAA, take the result at face value and cast their vote accordingly. Bance is keen to emphasise that brands matter too. Well, yeah. VAAs tend to either confirm or confound people’s prejudices (or “brand awareness” if you can only talk in marketing), but the thing is, everyone has prejudices. If there truly are people out there who use VAAs without having any prior awareness of political parties, that’s the parties’ and media’s fault – not having the VAA there isn’t going to help anyone; it would just lead to more disengagement.
VAAs are the start of the conversation, not the end of one. When I was working on Vote Match, that was always central to what we were trying to achieve. That’s why, back in the mists of time, I insisted on including a Twitter button to encourage engagement, despite the fact that no-one used Twitter back in 2008. That’s why we included the parties’ own statements in response to each question (if they were interested in providing them; most frankly don’t in the UK). That’s why we pointed people to look at information about their constituency. There is a live debate about how many disclaimers and clarifications you should put up on a VAA; should you swamp the user with explanations about why it is only a match against certain specific policies, not a fully objective and perfect answer? While it is good to include some disclaimers, for the most part people aren’t stupid and get that. It is only the political elites who seem to need to have those things pointed out to them.
So to reiterate: no, politics isn’t all about policies, and I highly doubt anyone behind a VAA thinks that any more than it would be utterly ridiculous to believe that because I built PartyFunding I must believe that the only thing people should consider is who funds parties. They give people a way to engage with the political process, and in a way that is on their terms and not the parties.
It is highly ironic to be having this debate a day after the last Prime Minister’s Questions of the year, in which Ed Miliband demanded David Cameron confirm if he would raise VAT or not and was completely wrong-footed when he got a straight answer. Because, when it suits them, political elites are always the first to tell you how important policy is; it is only when they don’t like what they’re being asked that they retreat into caveats about branding and core values.