Becuase Everything Else Sucks

Glassbooth, You, and Democracy

By evmonk
Published Monday, December 3rd, 2007, 12:08 pm
Filed under: US Politics

Glassbooth Results

That’s a screenshot of my general results page when I take the quiz at Glassbooth.org – a new non-partisan and not-for-profit site where you can take a custom-built quiz that matches you with the ’08 presidential candidates which best represent your beliefs. They’ve compiled the most comprehensive database around on every presidential candidate’s stance on every major issue, and the information is organized and classified in a way that’s intuitive, transparent and accessible at multiple levels of detail. (Full disclosure: I did some work for the site and am working on a short documentary about it for Current TV. Gay Rights research = me :))

This isn’t your older brother’s vote-match quiz. But you don’t have to take my word for it; take the other popular quizzes and make your own comparisons. They’re all fun, but Glassbooth is vote-match 2.0.

I can’t tell you the number of people I’ve recommended the quiz to who’ve pulled up Kucinich (or Gravel) as their #1 match. And as they read quotes and watch YouTube clips of the different candidates, they realize that who they thought they supported doesn’t really represent what they believe.

Dive into the different candidate positions and scoring justifications on your results page, and try the quiz again after setting different priorities. If you’re interested in how the site works, the Glassbooth blog has detailed descriptions of everything that’s going on under the hood, and the site uses all open-source tools. They’re very responsive to feedback, suggestions, and corrections, and are making a number of small and large improvements behind-the-scenes that will go into effect in the coming weeks and months.

As the model continues to grow and improve — and it gets applied to state and local elections where info on candidates is most hard to come by — Glassbooth and services like it have the potential to change the way we think about elections and our democracy.

Who knows what kind of impact Glassbooth can have in this election, but it’s gotten some pretty nice press since it launched earlier this month, so hopefully it can change some minds before the primaries. In any case, I hope you all enjoy it and I’d love to hear any feedback.

2 Responses to “Glassbooth, You, and Democracy”

  1. […] For Manila Ryce’s commentary: Glassbooth, You, and Democracy […]

  2. Thanks, that was an easy and fun one to do. :)

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