PIT Solutions builds Brazil Election Compasses

www.meuvoto2010.org and http://senado.edemocracycentre.ch/ are election compasses developed by PIT Solutions for the Brazil presidential and senate elections respectively.

The election compasses are VAAs (Voting Advice Applications) applications that enable prospective voters to compare how their policy preferences overlap with the stated policy positions of the main candidates.

Prior to an election, the main candidates are coded on their policy positions by a group of academic researchers. Users of the tool then fill in the same questionnaire and express their preferences. The system then matches the answers of the candidates with that of the users. The end result is a ranking of candidates based on the degree of congruence between the candidates and the user.

The PIT Solutions team has implemented both the compasses using the popular Symfony web-application framework.