A Guide to Voter Guides

Super Tuesday is over and the Presidential candidates are now hunting for votes in Florida. If you are having trouble deciding who to vote for you might want to consider one or more of these resources.

The League of Women Voters

All qualified presidential candidates were invited to provide biographical information and responses to five specific questions. Responses were limited to 400 characters and were truncated thereafter.

This could be a good voter guide for Democrats since the two remaining candidates both answered all of the questions, but only two of the remaining five Republicans answered the questions.

iSideWith.com

This "matchmaker" voter guide asks 85 questions about your position on issues in 11 different categories but you do not need to answer all 85 questions to get matched to a candidate. You are also asked to weight each answer on a scale from 1 to 5 (Least Important to Most Important). Plan to spend at least 30 minutes. This type of voter guide depends upon the algorithm used by the developers of the tool. Probably best used to narrow the choices.

Societly

Another "matchmaker" voter guide using several categories of sources to determine the candidates' positions, including:

• Candidate's 2016 Primary Election Platform
• Candidate's website content, Facebook, Twitter, etc...
• Interviews and other media coverage
• Actions/statements of candidate in House/Senate

There are only 20 questions. You can optionally weight the 20 questions on a 3-point scale. This tool should take no more than 5 minutes of your time, but like iSideWith, the matchmaking depends upon your trusting the developers' algorithm.

CNN 2016 Candidate Matchmaker

Kudos to CNN for properly labeling their 11 question matchmaker voter guide.

The American Gaming Association

If you like or hate the idea of casino gaming this voter guide will be useful. It uses quotes from the candidates to determine if they Oppose or Support casino gaming, or if they are "Mixed." Publishing the candidates' own words is helpful as it allows you to interpret the statements for yourself.

Florida Family Policy Council

This voter guide is similar to Societly in that it uses public statements made by each candidate on 8 different issues. Unlike Societly and iSideWide there is no algorithm. Instead the voter guide includes 55 footnotes with links to the sources used to identify the candidates’ positions.

Finally, if you do not have time to read any of the the above voter guides there is always the time-testing decision tool of drawing lots. Democrats can use a coin to choose between their 2 candidates. Republicans will have to use a die.