The idea
Smartvote.ie helped voters understand their election candidates. It asked 30 questions on current issues, from abortion and immigration to health insurance and JobBridge. Users rated how much each issue mattered to them, on a scale of one to five.
Smartvote then ranked the candidates by how closely they matched each user, and showed how each candidate had voted.
Cofounder Gordon Rose described the aim:
Users can get up to speed on the issues and candidates in just five to ten minutes, about the same time it takes to read one manifesto. There is way more to understanding and making a respectable decision about policies than a simple yes/no statement. But we do believe this is a great place to start.
Delivery
Smartvote was created by Gordon Rose and Keith Moore. Webinate, with Mathew Henson and Niall Farrel, delivered the server side: deployment, server setup, database management and the full back-end API.
The system recorded tens of thousands of completed surveys in the run-up to the election.