WITH the US election finally behind us, the short-term direction of the free world (and most of the rest of it) determined, it's time to get down to some really important business: today's New Zealand election.
Undecided? Help is at hand. There is a website that lets voters enter their opinions and values and then matches them with the political candidate who best represents their views.
Using a tool created for the US election by glassbooth.org , Kiwi voters can assign points to a series of policy areas according to the importance they place on each - crime and punishment, the environment and energy, foreign policy and trade, family and morals and more. Then they take a short quiz: do you support or oppose lowering company tax rates? What about a non-parole period for repeat offenders? Foreign-ownership restrictions? Increasing the minimum wage?
Then click a button, and out pops your top candidate, with percentage matches on each area of policy and a link to quotes explaining their position - rather like Perfect Match for the politically challenged.
Pretty neat, until I learned that, according to the Glassbooth poll, my values line up with something called United Future New Zealand, which sounds a hair's breadth away from the legalise-marijuana wackjobs and the family-values wowsers on the fringes. Not that there's anything wrong with that - after all, apparently I support most of their policies.
In the US Glassbooth says my views align closely to those of the presidential candidate Ralph Nader. Who knew he was running? Nader and I are peas in a pod on gay rights, abortion issues and banning assault weapons. It's concerning, because clearly someone who has run five times for president since 1992 must have every single one of his marbles intact.
But who is this for, anyway? Would the neophytes of generation Y be sufficiently engaged to even have an opinion on collective bargaining, or unrestricted free trade? There is a "skip" option in the quiz questions if the potential voter finds him or herself unable to decide whether to support keeping KiwiSaver in its current form. (I'm still deciding.)
Worse than cheat sheets for the apathetic, it's a cheat sheet for the apathetic who want to look like they care but don't want to work at understanding the political process. Why get informed if you can just take a pop quiz and press a button? What if votes were determined by gut feeling - "Hmmm. I don't support the retention of the Maori seats, come to think of it!" - and a few mouse clicks? Journalists, pundits and assorted talking heads may be out of a job. Gulp.
The Kiwis resisted introducing online voting for this election due to fears of voter fraud, and with tools like this you can see why. Election coverage may one day be reduced to a handful of competing websites where you answer a few multiple-choice questions and get told who to vote for. Now there's a streamlined democracy.