Connect2Elect.com - Chooses Candidates For You, Sort Of

Don't know who to vote for in 2008? Let Connect2Elect decide for you. Well, sort of. Connect2Elect provides a database of candidates and their attributes, along with the today's most pressing social, political, and moral issues (as chosen by Connect2Elect). It matches you up with your ideal candidate by asking you to choose up to ten issues in each of these three categories. To do this, simply mouse over an issue for its complete description, and if it's important enough to you, click on it and it will be automatically added to your profile list. For example, let's say you want a candidate that has already served in Congress, opposes the Patriot Act, supports immigrant amnesty, and is bilingual. Choose each of these items in "Personal Attributes", "Social Issues", "Political Issues", and "Core Beliefs", respectively. Continue to do so until you've either exhausted your 10-item-per-category limit or until you've selected all the issues that are important to you. Connect2Elect will then generate a circular diagram of your results, with a pin representing you in the center. The diagram is then populated with colored pins (colors corresponding to party affiliation), whose proximity to your pin represents how close they stand to you on your selected issues. You can also choose to view your results in list form so you can see how the candidates rank against each other in accordance with your specifications.

"Connect2Elect is an independent, unbiased matching service that uses some of the coolest technology on the Web to give citizens the power to navigate through the oftentimes confusing process of selecting the best candidate for the most important job in America".

Connect2Elect could be a really useful site for those of you who haven't been keeping up with the candidates and their campaign issues and provides an easy way for you to discover not only which candidates might be good choices for you to for vote for, but also to learn more about their competition. Plus, it's actually fun, and easy to use.

Connect2Elect requires some level of knowledge, as it doesn't give any in-depth explanations about the issues (I think a large majority of voters may not know exactly where the U.S might drill domestically or have the wording in the No Child Left Behind act down pat). It would be good if there was some sort of appendix or glossary detailing some of the issues; I would think the average Connect2Elect users would definitely be the sort of person who would benefit from brushing up on their campaign issues. Something that really disappointed me is that Connect2Elect doesn't give you the option of selecting just how important to you each issue is. For example, I wouldn't give as much weight to my candidate having to be bilingual as I would to having him or her having an advanced degree. It would be great of Connect2Elect offered a scale that lets you designate importance using a 1-5 system, or something of that sort.