French Presidential Election Apps Help Voters Choose Among 12 Candidates

A French report highlights how, with fewer than twenty days left before the first round of the presidential election, students, collectives, volunteers and the media have created websites and apps to help voters choose among 12 candidates.

“You've seen the political compass, I'm sure: that admirable attempt to map every viewpoint onto two axes”

Boing Boing

Jevote.info, created in 2017 by five students and revived this year, is described as an online questionnaire based on candidates' programs and proposals, offering between three and five responses after about thirty questions.

britmonkey

The Presidential Compass, launched in mid-March by the Center for Political Research at Sciences Po (Cevipof) in partnership with Ouest-France and 20 minutes, uses a questionnaire with 26 proposals after users provide information including gender, year of birth, and degree.

Élyze is presented as an app with more than 2 million downloads that uses a Tinder-style matching model, showing proposals such as establishing a climate wealth tax and establishing the right to vote at 16 for users to swipe on.

The report also notes that Lost in My Elections was created in January of last year by the makesense platform in partnership with several collectives, Actes Sud editions and the Voxe.fr media, aiming to encourage young people to vote informedly.

The Radio France report says Jevote.info aims to be transparent, stating that the creators belong to no party, develop the site in their spare time, and store only questionnaire results anonymously hosted by a French company.

It adds that to ensure the algorithm operates in a way that is completely transparent and visible, the code is open source, with the report describing the site creators' emphasis on openness.

Radio France

For Élyze, the report says bugs were found and that reliability, independence and security were questioned, including an example where an engineer managed to insert his own name into the presidential proposals.

The report states that since then, fixes have been made and the creators have said the data collected have been deleted and the code turned open source.

In parallel, Boing Boing describes a different kind of political scoring tool, saying it is a "64-question compass" that scores people on "Chud vs. Woke" and more, and that it will even compare users to a contemporary political figure who holds their same views.

Boing Boing frames its compass as an update to the traditional political compass, asking how the traditional political compass is supposed to reflect how the author feels about AI and describing the result as "Not good".

“Advertisement Presidential election: five sites and apps to help voters choose their candidate By Noémie Lair • 5 min read The time to choose is approaching”

Radio France

The same Boing Boing piece says the site will "instantly start a fight" when brought up at a family gathering, and it describes the quiz as comparing a user to Greta Thunberg.

Radio France, meanwhile, describes how Élyze shows proposals without indicating which candidate the measure corresponds to, inviting users to swipe proposals right when they approve and left when they disagree.

The report also says the Presidential Compass proceeds after filling in information including gender, year of birth, and degree, then uses a questionnaire with 26 proposals such as "France's immigration policy should be more restrictive."

Across both stories, the common thread is that technology-mediated questionnaires and scoring systems are being used to help people locate themselves relative to candidates' programs or to map viewpoints onto axes, with Radio France emphasizing open-source code and data deletion after bugs were found.