
“It's like an OkCupid for voting” – the Finnish election engines - luu
https://www.snellman.net/blog/archive/2015-05-11-okcupid-for-voting-the-finnish-election-engines/
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makeitsuckless
I think the author should look at other countries before declaring the Finnish
system an outlier.

The only "major" difference I've managed to find with the Dutch system is a
slightly bigger emphasis in individual candidates due to "unsorted" party
listings (although the article isn't quite clear about it, if the Finnish
parties can sort their own list on the ballot, the systems are pretty much the
same).

Other than that, it's mostly minor cultural differences. These kind of
"election engines" are all over the place in Dutch elections, I doubt whether
that is any different in any multi-party democracy.

 _Edit_ : Just looked it up for fun: these things pre-date OkCupid by almost a
decade (more if you count the offline versions).

~~~
jsnell
I did cover all of these points to some extent in the post, but could of
course be wrong.

\- I'm aware that similar sites exist in other countries. From talking to
people in many such countries my understanding is that they are not as
influential (see numbers in the post on the reach and influence; e.g half the
voters using one of these sites, and a sixth of those users just taking the
top recommendation).

\- There is no ordering at all to the list, it's formed completely by the
voters. (Well, there's an ordering in that everyone candidate is randomly
assigned a 2-3 digit id number). This is to me a fundamental difference, since
there is no obvious fallback option for "I just want to vote for this party",
and that case becomes entirely about name recognition. It should be possible
to check whether this really does make a difference, by checking what
proportion of celebrities got "accidentally" elected under the different
systems.

\- Yes, the first Finnish version was from the mid-90s, and the story of the
site I built predates OkCupid too. But when you're explaining X in terms of Y,
there's no assertion of causality (or even of Y existing before X). What
matters is whether Y is a cultural referent that's likely to be shared by the
readers.

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wmt
These election engines have been around for a really long time, but the funny
thing is that often no matter how you answer the topical questions, you'll
very likely end up getting a few candidates from very surprising parties.

Unfortunately these election machines always tend to focus on individuals
instead of parties. In the Finnish elections a vote to a candidate gives a
vote for her party, and the popularity of the candidates within the party
decides how the party votes are redistributed, which finally decides which
candidates get seats from the district.

This means you always should pick the political party first, and only then
look at candidates within the party. Too bad many folks don't realise this,
vote for a populist party with candidates to cover even the most ridiculous
viewpoints, and indirectly end up voting for candidates who they would never
want to vote in.

------
jayzalowitz
I like this concept, but i so had the name first.
[http://techcrunch.com/2011/12/16/okcandidate-snags-
okcupids-...](http://techcrunch.com/2011/12/16/okcandidate-snags-okcupids-
approach-tells-you-who-to-vote-for/)

~~~
pjungwir
It looks like my startup beat you by a week and a half: :-)

[http://www.fastcompany.com/1799193/disrupting-democracy-
keya...](http://www.fastcompany.com/1799193/disrupting-democracy-keya-
dannenbaum-her-okcupid-politics-and-future-elections)

Apparently neither of us lasted though!

~~~
erispoe
What's the business model you had in mind?

It looks hard enough to even get people to vote, they are pretty disengaged
towards politics in general, and I don't see how to base a business model on
having people spending time fumbling with political stuff. Regularly we see
new startups coming in with platforms where voters could engage and do x, y,
z. I'm quite sceptical there is a demand for political engagement in the first
place large enough to sustain a business model.

But having gone through this, I'm really interested in having your thoughts on
that.

~~~
pjungwir
Well with a few years of hindsight I'd say I agree with you. If we had figured
out a business model ElectNext would still be around.

(After I left my partner did keep the company alive by pivoting into reader
engagement for online news, but in my opinion the vision of helping voters was
abandoned.)

Business models we considered:

\- Letting politicians pay to get more control over their profile on our site.

\- Letting politicians pay to turn on voter engagement features, so that
voters could sign up for a mailing list, sign up to volunteer, etc.

\- We actually got paid by the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia to
license our tech for some kiosks in their exhibit, but the integration effort
wasn't really worth what they paid us.

\- We had some media companies interested in an embeddable "widget" based on
our technology. I think the Economist and the Philadelphia Inquirer used us.
This eventually led to the pivot.

\- There were plenty of other ideas, but it was all a long time ago. We were
very dedicated to protecting our users' privacy, and also to protecting our
own reputation as unbiased, so that took many ideas off the table. Taking
politician money at all felt super risky, but who else are you going to sell
to? EDIT: Also, you have to have a lot more users than we achieved, with a
much more vibrant community, for any politician to even care. And unbiased
politics is pretty dry. These days I think of politics mostly as
entertainment, and we weren't entertaining.

Politics is a tough space, and lots of VCs told us they flat out didn't invest
in politics startups. I can't say I really blame them. For all the money in
that space, it's not easy capturing it in a way that lets you sleep at night.
The voters aren't the ones paying. Media companies are all struggling not to
go bankrupt. Also a four-year business cycle is pretty rough.

~~~
erispoe
Thanks for your feedback.

A lot of startups in that space seem to rely on building a large community of
engaged voters, and then they'll figure out where to extract money, social
media style. The problem as you point out is building that community in the
first place, bacause we'd need a pivotal change in our politicla system for
that to happen. Interested voters? There's not a single country in the world
where a big chunk of the lectorate dedicate a significant amount of time to
figure out how to vote. Money certainly can't be extracted for voters, I don't
imagine people paying in one way or another to get tod who to vote for.

Why didn't you follow the money more directly and create a product aimed at
politicians or PACs? Couldn't the intelligence you built be used by campaigns?

Were VCs curious about how you would eventually make money out of this?

