Voting Advice Applications: Do they help with voter turnout?

Remember CBC Vote Compass? CBC said 2 million Canadians used it during the May 2 election. The basic idea behind the tool is that a voter answers a series of questions and then the software returns a result telling the voter who he or she is politcally aligned line with, based on the answers to the questions.

The Vote Compass tool is part of a class of software tools called voting advice applications (VAAs).

The CBC's VAA became controversial because, as the folks at Rabble.ca pointed out, it appeared to be “miscalibrated”. We reported that it seemed to have a default tendency to inform the user that s/he was a federal Liberal.

In any event: VAAs are often seen as a neat way to get young people or those who have never voted before interested enough in politics that they might actually want to cast a ballot.

Some European researchers took a look at this premise by examining use of a VAA used in Switzerland called smartvote and, in a paper published last year (but which i just ran across today), found that while it did indeed break through to young people, it was predominantly used by those who needed such a tool the least, namely better-educated, higher-income men.

We do not yet have a breakdown of voter turnout on May 2 by age group (turnout was higher, overall, than the 2008 election but just barely and 2008 was an all-time low for voter turnout) and, of course, the data collected by CBC through its Vote Compass is CBC's. Would love, though, to see a story from CBC, though, that summarizes the data from its 2 million users with some possible lessons learned. (In fact: Maybe someone did that story and I missed. Would be grateful for the link if you've got it.)