You can try the calculator right now. Answer the questions and find out which of the candidates could be “yours”.
The election calculator is used to compare the opinions and attitudes of the public with what politicians do and promise. This is a long-term project of the KohoVolit.eu association, which launched the first calculator 18 years ago. Since then, they have prepared more than a hundred of them, not only for Czech elections, but also for Slovak, Hungarian, Polish, Austrian and other European countries. Now, after the European elections, we are bringing a calculator for senate and regional elections.
Regional and senate elections 2024
Calculator as a guide
The calculator shows agreement in opinions and attitudes, but it is always up to the voters who they vote for.
We know from experience that the candidates themselves (in the case of regional elections of the entire party and movement) answer on the basis of at least two principles:
1. How they think it should be in an ideal world.
2. What, according to them, is realistically passable.
The main reason for the creation of the calculator was to serve the public: to offer a helping hand and get to know the spectrum of personalities, parties and movements (some of which do not even publish their programs). The ambiguity of the offer of personalities or parties persists to this day, when candidates and entire political entities have often moved from their own websites to social networks.
The calculator is one of the easiest ways to present your positions to the widest public. Not everyone is content with simply shouting and inciting culture wars; voters very often demand a realistic program that contains ideas about the functioning of health care, education, etc.
At the same time, they want to know what the candidates really mean: Should the country really leave the EU? Should a progressive tax be more structured?
We didn’t leave anyone out
Before every election, we address all candidates – without exception – either directly or their proposing political parties. Everyone received a description of the calculator as a tool and clear instructions on how to fill in the answers. Everyone was also given the opportunity to comment on the chosen topic, if they did not want to limit themselves to yes or no answers.
What is an election calculator
🟢 The election calculator is one of the essential pre-election tools for voters today to help them make decisions. It is used in various forms by voters in a number of countries around the world (specifically this one in Slovakia, Hungary, Poland and other European countries).
🟢 In the Czech Republic, depending on the type of election, a tenth to a quarter of voters use it.
🟢 This is an online application in which you answer questions that were asked to all candidates and candidate entities at the same time. The application then compares your chosen answers with the answers of individual candidates, evaluates their proximity and displays who you agree with the most and with whom the least.
🟢 Preparation takes place in such a way that all candidates and entities are approached with sets of questions relevant to the given election period. Their answers are recorded in the application and will be displayed to all interested parties during the evaluation. If the party or some candidates do not respond, voters are notified.
🟢 The author of the calculator is mathematician, statistician and demographer Michal Škop, founder of the civic association KohoVolit.eu, which has been using data for public control for a long time. Data journalist and analyst Kateřina Mahdalová is in charge of the content part and communication with the media and candidate personalities and entities. The latter also prepares analytical outputs from the calculator itself according to how the parties, male and female candidates answered.
How to tell if the calculator is working
Calculator users sometimes claim that they do not know whether their results are biased by the algorithm used to calculate them. Or that the results are pre-set and favor selected candidates. Everyone can try out the functionality of the calculator:
What happens if you first answer yes to all questions and then answer no to all questions? You will get two lists of pages, the order of which will be exactly opposite. Of course, if the algorithm were to favor someone, that party would always come first.
How are questions formed?
The basis for the selection of topics for the election calculator is the latest agency surveys on what topics potential voters consider important. Furthermore, for inspiration, we use topics with which foreign calculators work and which have a common basis for voters regardless of nationality. We invite experts from, for example, non-profit or professional organizations to consultations.
A long history of the calculator
The association KohoVolit.eu has been creating electoral calculators since 2006 for almost all elections at all levels of political competition (European, presidential, parliamentary, regional and municipal, etc.).
In total, the association has already created more than 100 applications and is a leader in the field of election calculators in both countries, and the term “election calculator” was gradually introduced as a general name for this type of application in the Czech and Slovak languages.
This concept has already entered the political thinking of citizens, the media and the political entities themselves.
Major update 2022-2023
Thanks to long-term cooperation with a community of expert volunteers Czech Republic. digital and the deployment of several dozen enthusiasts, the calculator has undergone (and is still undergoing) major technical and design changes in the last two years. A huge thank you goes out to everyone involved.
