Understanding Small Business: The Polling Platform

In the modern political discourse, there is plenty of opinionated, even biased conversation, plenty of openly partisan motivation and comparatively little real, objective eff ort at educating voters on matters of policy.

But objective, unbiased voter education is precisely the mandate of the VoteCompass tool, an "electoral literacy application" developed and operated by a small group of academics in the political science department at the University of Toronto, and one full-time project manager.

Distributed by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation during several recent Canadian elections at the federal and provincial level, VoteCompass is a web-based application that seeks to show voters, via survey questions, how their own opinions on key policy issues for a given election compare to the publicly stated platforms of the major political parties.

By posing about 30 questions (for example, "Canada should seek closer economic relations with the USA"), identified as important by staff, VoteCompass can tell a user where they stand on those issues relative to the major parties, and which party's platform is most consistent with their views overall.

The project debuted during the 2011 Canadian federal election, but it has been in development for about two years, says Clifton vander Linden, the founder and executive director of VoteCompass.

"I was a visiting faculty at a university in Europe a few years ago," he says, "and the Dutch parliament fell while I was there. I noted these tools, or similar tools, were popping up all over the place - they're very popular in Europe. In fact, they've almost become an institution in most European countries. What we actually did for the federal election was we licensed the software from a Dutch provider of this application. We modified it for the Canadian election, and after the federal election, we decided to build our own."

The group contracted a developer to build a version of the application, and has been iterating on that software with each new election - Vote-Compass has since covered provincial elections in Quebec, British Columbia and Alberta.

Along with providing the user immediate feedback, the tool has the secondary effect of gathering an incredible amount of data on how the electorate feels about the policy issues on which they are being surveyed. The result of that, says van der Linden, is a data set that can be mined to create a better understanding of where the voting stands on those policy issues.

The application itself is a heavy web application performing multiple tasks at once - collecting and storing the data submitted by the user, and processing that data to produce the results delivered at the end of the survey.

VoteCompass runs on a set of servers at Canadian Web Hosting, including a load balancer, development servers, database severs and application servers. The project demanded a hosting provider able to handle its basic performance needs.

But VoteCompass had some unique needs as well. The CBC's privacy and data security policies required that the servers and bandwidth be located inside Canada. And van der Linden says the company needed a provider that was nimble and adaptable, since Canadian elections can happen on fairly short notice, any time during the year, and a tool like VoteCompass can attract a much bigger flood of traffic than anticipated. In the 2011 federal election, the tool had more than 2 million respondents. Not bad, considering the population of Canada is a little more than 30 million.

"There's a huge amount of work on our side," says van der Linden, "so we needed this nimble, dynamic, adaptive oranization that could quickly turn things around, and Canadian Web Hosting seemed to be that kind of organization, and has proven to be that kind of organization for us. They're responsive and they're proactive at the same time."