Nathaniel Gaynor

Apps to Help You Decide

I have watched hours and hours of election coverage this political season. It is hard not to be glued to the screen to hear what outrageous thing Donald Trump just said, or chuckle a bit at some of Jeb Bush’s saddest campaign moments. It’s hard to pay attention with Bernie Sanders and Sarah Palin “Saturday Night Live” skits popping up at every turn.

I’ve watched nearly every debate and consumed media from almost every outlet that you can think of.

The coolest media-based tool I have seen in this election is a website called iSideWith.com. This site lets you take a short test (with the ability to answer more context-based questions should you choose) to tell you which candidates you support most in the 2016 presidential election.

The app breaks down your opinions into percentages that match each candidate. The most surprising thing I found was that there was no single candidate I whole-heartedly disagreed with on all issues.

One of my friends found the site, and then in a matter of 10 minutes, all of my friends had taken the quiz and we reviewed the results together. We discussed politics from a place where each of us was now a little more informed. Tools like this change the game for elections, allowing people to base their opinions on actual information rather than what they see on TV.

Reading the articles this week, it seems that more and more, voters are looking for easy to use and understand applications as tools to help them make their decisions in the election.

This is very clear in the National Journal article from this week. The idea of the app Change Politics is genius. It allows users to submit questions and then candidates will respond with the best answers rising to the top. The app fulfills the voters’ hunger for new ways to interact during the election. This is a great way to interact with the candidates outside of town halls and watching the news.

At the same time, The Boston Globe‘s election app with a countdown to the next update is interesting as well. It’s an easy to use tool to stay up to date on the election without have to do much work (like to manually refreshing all of the time).

There are more apps and tools than just these three that I have mentioned. AppAdvice lists six great apps to keep up this election season.

The more people become aware of these applications, the more popular they will become because in my opinion people really do need help deciding on elections.

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