If you’re living somewhere that has one, I hope that you’re planning to vote in your upcoming municipal elections. Here in Ontario, they’re on October 26th.
If you want to vote but aren’t sure who to vote for, I don’t blame you. Municipal politics is hard. Provincially and federally it’s generally pretty clear what the main parties are all about, and you only have to pick one person. But locally, things are a lot different. Depending on where you are, you can wind up voting for a lot of stuff. Here in Kitchener, for instance, we have city councillors, regional councillors, a mayor and school board trustees. We would normally also have to pick a regional chair, but Doug Ford has decided that what we really need is an appointed town puppet whose job will be to ask “How high?” whenever he yells “Jump!”, so we no longer vote for that because who needs local democracy or accountability anyway, amiright? And when it comes to all of those positions, there are no official party lines. It’s just a whole bunch of people with a whole bunch of opinions, and it can be difficult to sort it all out in a way that makes you feel good about your choices.
That’s where the Vox Pop Labs Vote Compass might be able to help. Tell it where you live by postal code and it will ask you a bunch of questions (I got 30 of them) about where you stand on various issues. It will then give you the names of candidates whose views most align with yours. Sadly it doesn’t help with the school board vote, which is the one I’m having the most trouble with. But it most definitely did give me something to chew on.
My best choices for city and regional council landed about where I expected they would. There were obviously some new faces because the field is different each time, but there were plenty of folks that I’ve either voted for or thought about voting for on my list. But the mayoral race was a different story. My thought was that while I don’t agree with everything he does, that I would likely vote for Berry Vrbanovic again because he’s largely done a good job. But according to the compass, he should be my sixth choice out of the six options it gave me and I really ought to consider Cindy Ward as my front runner.
Alrighty then. Seems I’ve got some more research to do. But that’s not a bad thing whatsoever.
And a note for screen reader users. If you’re not in the mood to futz around with people’s broken accessibility, skip the optional questions at the end. The lists where you can select more than one option work fine, but the radio buttons? Hoooh boy. You can’t read them in or out of forms mode and the only way to tell which one you’re on is to pick one and then tab and shift tab around until it reads it to you. That was my experience with the latest Firefox and NVDA, at least.