10-17-2008

Election's Top 10 Questions

If the three presidential debates have left anyone undecided about their choice between John McCain and Barak Obama, a Carnegie Mellon graduate student’s Web site, www.VoteChooser.com, could aid in settling any remaining internal turmoil. But even if answering the site’s 10-question quiz doesn’t help someone pick a preferred candidate, it could help researchers develop a novel method for combining information from different types of surveys.

More than 1.5 million people visited the site last spring during the presidential primaries and, now that the site has been updated for the general election, about 1,000 additional people are visiting each day. Developed by Bryant Lee, who is pursuing a doctorate in computer science, the site poses 10 questions about issues of the day and then tells the potential voter which candidate has the most similar set of positions on those issues.

The site provides Lee with raw data for use in a research project (http://www.votechooser.com/research.html) on how to improve polling techniques. Random digit dialling (RDD) is a reliable technique used in conventional phone surveys by polling companies such as Gallup; its downside is that RDD surveys are expensive to conduct. Online surveys are easier and cheaper, but have inherent biases, in part because they do not include a random sample of the population. Lee, working with a University of Pittsburgh political scientist, is developing a method that uses artificial intelligence techniques to combine data from RDD and online surveys in a way that corrects for the biases of each technique.

Lee says the preliminary results for the new method are encouraging, but he continues to collect data through www.VoteChooser.com with hopes of refining it further. 

Byron Spice