People are getting mad online about Vote Compass telling them which party closest resembles their policy preferences (Image: Vote Compass)
People are getting mad online about Vote Compass telling them which party most closely resembles their policy preferences (Image: Vote Compass)

The ABC has defended its Vote Compass tool from people who were upset after being informed which party their policy views most closely align with.

Each election cycle, the ABC works with international Vox Pop Labs to provide an Australian version of the Vote Compass, an online tool that uses a brief questionnaire to graph a person’s political views relative to Australia’s major parties. 

The Vote Compass tool is upfront about only taking each party’s policies into consideration and not other factors such as representation and track record. These policy positions are prepared by a team of political scientists who then check with the political parties to ensure they are accurate, according to the Vote Compass methodology. 

Just under 300,000 people have used Vote Compass so far this year. Some of them are taking issue with the tool because it didn’t give them the response they wanted. 

In particular, many people who identified as Labor voters have been told their views more closely align with the Greens. One particularly viral tweet from @JohnGar77003277 questioned the results: “Just completed ABC ‘Vote Compass.’ It says I’m a Green voter. Actually I’m a social Democrat who votes Labor. How did this result happen?” 

Dozens of people replied in chorus, lamenting the same result. Guardian Australia columnist Van Badham even criticised Vote Compass as being “deceptive” for not taking into consideration “the likelihood of a party being able to deliver the policies you like”, despite the tool explicitly saying it only considers policy preferences and not other factors.

Some people also noticed that Labor had been moved further towards the conservative side of the social issues axis compared with previous iterations.

Chris Salisbury worked on the University of Queensland team that helped devise the 2015 Vote Compass for the state election that year. He responded on Twitter to people’s criticisms by saying that parties were responsible for the changes in their position on the political grid. 

He also offered a barb to those criticising the tool in bad faith: “What hasn’t changed is people misconstruing Vote Compass as ‘ABC bias’, as ‘defective’/‘deceptive’ or as advocating who to vote for.”

In a statement provided to Crikey, an ABC spokesperson reiterated the stated purpose and limitations of the tool: “[Vote Compass] is designed to get people engaged in the democratic process. Sometimes users are surprised at their results. The user then has the opportunity to explore party policies more in-depth.

“Vote Compass does not tell people how to vote,” the spokesperson said.