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The Spokesman-Review Newspaper
Spokane, Washington  Est. May 19, 1883

Election Compass: New international effort to track voter trends

Voter surveys of the presidential race have come a long way in the 80 years since the Literary Digest predicted Alf Landon would make Franklin Roosevelt a one-term president.

FDR actually won the 1936 race in a landslide and the Literary Digest poll became a notorious example of what happens when a survey doesn’t contact a diverse enough group of people.

Election Compass USA 2016, a joint effort of European and American researchers and academics with news media partners that include The Spokesman-Review, may cast the widest net to date to determine voters’ views on issues and try to match them with this year’s crop of candidates seeking the White House.

Patterned after similar surveys for several European elections, Election Compass asks participants 30 questions on key issues, then matches each voter’s personal opinion to the candidate’s positions.

“The Election Compass does not tell users how they should vote, but shows users their proximity to each candidate across a range of policy issues,” Andre Krouwel, an associate professor of comparative politics and communications at Vrije University of Amsterdam and the founder of Kieskompas, the Netherlands-based company that developed the survey tool. “With a simple mouse click, the positions of all the candidates are visible.”

Past participation varies, but in the 2014 parliamentary elections in Sweden, an estimated 40 percent of the electorate used a version of the compass.

Recently unveiled for the Iowa caucuses, the American project hopes to continue to gather information about voters’ stands on various issues through the fall election, detect trends from daily responses and even map how issues are playing in different parts of the country.

In adapting the survey tool for the United States, Kieskompas enlisted the help of more than 25 academics from universities across the country, including Travis Ridout, the Thomas S. Foley Distinguished Professor of Government and Public Policy at Washington State University.

This Election Compass could be useful for voters who are facing a large number of candidates this year, particularly on the Republican side, Ridout said. Sorting through the choices can be a big task for voters, and the survey forces participants to think about the issue differences among candidates, he said.