A record number of people have used the Vote Match tool to help decide how to vote in the run up to polling day, reports Unlock Democracy.

1,000 people have used Vote Match in the last hour. 8,000 people have used the application in the last 24 hours, the same number who used it during the week before. More than 40,000 Londoners have now used the tool with many more expected on the day.

Director of Unlock Democracy Peter Facey said:

“With the polls suggesting the race for London Mayor is neck and neck, public interest in this election is much higher than it was four years ago. But it is also clear that there are a lot of people out there who are still undecided about how to vote.

“The election for Mayor is likely to be decided by second preference votes and even the small parties have a chance of gaining seats in the London Assembly. I would encourage as many people as possible to go out and vote. You have until 10pm tonight.”

“Vote Match has been the internet phenomenon of the London elections and is a proven tool for increasing turnout in elections. We are delighted at how successful it has been and will be looking at how to replicate its success in this election during the European Elections next year and beyond.”

Writing in thelondonpaper today, Kate Egglestone reviews Vote Match:

I have found various tools on the internet to help me decide who to vote for. The best by far has been ­VoteMatch (www.votematch.co.uk). The website is set up to tell you which candidate you agree with most. I was surprised by the result it gave me. All of the mayoral candidates have answered a set of questions (yes, there are more than two candidates). The questions are designed to bring out the differences in their policies (again, yes, Ken and Boris have policies). The website then tells you, in a very helpful bar graph, which of the candidates you should support.

Vote Match has been the internet phenomenon of this year’s London elections. We have now had 28,000 users and the numbers keep growing. We’ve had glowing endorsements, mentions by bloggers and the mainstream media and even been nominated for an award.

We’re trying to reach out to as many people as possible. That’s why we’re asking you to do one simple thing: email just ten of your friends, family and colleagues.

Click here:

That’s it. If you do, we’ll reach out to tens of thousands of new people in no time at all. And if they forward it onto ten of their friends and colleagues… you get the idea.

Why is this important? Because Vote Match is a proven tool for raising voter turnout. Our sister projects in the Netherlands and Germany found that Vote Match helped persuade up to 15% of non-voters to cast their ballot. With an election looking to be as close as this one, every vote will count.

Your help and financial assistance has been vital in making Vote Match the massive success it has been so far. Thanks a lot. As polling day looms, this one last push could help make all the difference.

The Vote Match Team.

Director of Unlock Democracy Peter Facey has written an article on Comment is Free about the London elections. In it he talks about the experience of developing Vote Match:

Policy has been sidelined in this election, and this has been stage managed by the two front-runners. On a vast swath of issues, Johnson and Livingstone have been stealing each others’ clothes with abandon. This has made developing Vote Match, Unlock Democracy’s project to promote voter engagement, particularly difficult. I think we’ve broadly succeeded, but voters looking for fundamental points of principle to differentiate the top two will struggle.

One of the interesting things to emerge from the Vote Match project has been the fact that a considerable number of traditional Conservative voters have come out as best matched to Gerard Batten, the UK Independence party candidate. This is for the simple reason that in the mayoral election his populist platform has the most to offer to Thatcherite voters, while Johnson has done all he can to avoid being tarred with the rightwing brush. There are many reasons why these Conservative supporters might nevertheless want to give Johnson their first preference vote, but his manifesto is not one of them.

Read London’s Forgotten Elections in full.

Unlock Democracy’s Vote Match quiz - a tool designed to help inform voters about the London elections - received its 25,000th user this morning.

Vote Match has been the internet phenomenon of the London elections and is one of the most used websites Londoners are using to find out more about the candidates.

Commenting, Director of Unlock Democracy Peter Facey said:

“25,000 users is a phenomenal number given the comparatively small marketing budget we have been able to invest into this project. The feedback on the blogosphere has been encouraging, with most users agreeing that the quiz is both easy to use and informative about where the various candidates stand.

“Vote Match is a proven tool for increasing turnout. Our sister projects in the Netherlands and Germany found that 15% of their users who did not intend to vote went onto do so. The more people we can get using the tool between now and polling day, the more will go on to vote.”

Although the statistics gleaned from the Vote Match website are not a representative poll of London opinion, they do reveal some interesting facts. The users of the site consider congestion charge, housing, youth services and poverty to be the top issues. Perhaps surprisingly, one in eight Vote Match users consider the ban on feeding pigeons to be an important issue to them.

The most consensus could be found disagreeing with the statement that “Inter-racial marriage should be strongly discouraged” (BNP policy) agreeing with “Prepay Oyster card users should have unlimited travel on the buses within an hour for a single charge” (Lib Dem and Green policy) and agreeing with “Under 18s who abuse their free travel on buses should have it withdrawn and have to earn it back through community service” (Labour and Conservative policy). By contrast, the most divisive statements are “The London Development Agency should be used to promote ethnic diversity“, “Motorcyclists should be allowed to travel on bus lanes” and “Unemployment should be tackled by giving businesses more freedom“. See table below for more information.

Peter Facey added:

“What is clear from the survey is that most people agree with elements of all the candidate’s manifestos. Vote Match is proving itself to be a popular guide to help voters come to a conclusion on how to vote.”

The figure of 25,004 is accurate as of 11.30am on Wednesday 23 April and is set to increase.

Table of Vote Match statements in order of importance

(based on 25,004 responses)

* These statements were added to the quiz on 8 April by which point approximately 7,500 people had already used the quiz. In these cases the first number given has been weighted to reflect this while the number in parenthesis is the raw data).

Vote Match has been mentioned in the Evening Standard’s Election Diary today:

MAN IN THE NEWS

Peter Facey

THE director of Unlock Democracy has launched www.votematch.co.uk - a project to boost voter turn-out. The website poses 25 questions on a range of London issues and asks voters to agree or disagree. Based on their responses, the site works out who they should be voting for. Mr Facey said: “The polling evidence suggests the election could be extremely close. Every vote cast could make a difference.” About 15,000 people have already had a go.

As of now, we’re actually up to 17,000 users, but who’s counting?

It’s been a week since we last summed up how the blogosphere has been responding to Vote Match, and there’s a lot to catch up on! We’re extremely grateful to bloggers who help promote this website as they are helping us to reach out to as many people as possible - thanks! Bloggers can help still further by adding a button to their site. Without further ado, here are some of the comments we’ve had.

Cased is quite glowing:

… a rather nifty interactive tool to help you uncover which mayoral candidate’s policies best match your own priorities. Excellent stuff….clear interface and tangible, useful outputs. Just how I like my eDemocracy in the mornings… mmmmhm.

Guardian writer Dave Hill suggests that Ken Livingstone ought to give Vote Match a try and his fellow Guardianista Michael White also gives us a plug (although he came up with Brian Paddick when he tried the quiz).

Dave Cole makes a novel suggestion about how Vote Match can be used to help determine peoples’ second preference votes for the Mayor election.

Camies seems happier with Vote Match, presumably since we made some small changes to the quiz last week. Gary Andrews remarks that since using Vote Match, “I’ve got a better idea of what the assorted candidates stand for”.

Other links: Kezia Dugdale’s Soapbox, Rupa Huq, Wyn Grant, Defy the Stars, Anglepoised Steam, New Direction, Kateshomeblog, Clare’s diary, Doctor Vee, Stratford Girl, A Foolish Interruption, Martin Meenagh, Someday I will treat you good, Inside the Bakery, Dirty European Socialist, Yorksher Gob, Liberal Bureaucracy, Politics, PR & Marketing, LondonSays.

Apologies if we’ve missed you from this list - we currently have over 540 different websites linking here! Keep them coming!

Vote Match has been nominated for the Democracy in Action category of the New Statesman New Media Awards.

Ok, we admit it, we nominated ourselves (as is perfectly within the rules - and indeed is recommended). We think Vote Match is a great tool for engaging the public in politics and democratic participation and we hope you do to.

Please support our nomination by voting for us. The greater recognition Vote Match gets, the higher our profile which means that we can reach out to more people both with this and future Vote Match projects.

Vote Match London has had an overwhelmingly positive reception, but in the interests of making it as good as possible, we have changed a number of statements in the survey. Try taking it again to see for yourself (note: you may need to reload the page to ensure your browser doesn’t use a cached version of the old quiz if you have done it recently).

Specifically, we have decided to remove the following statements:

We should increase the number of Community Support Officers on the streets to support police.

London doesn’t need any more skyscrapers.

The London Assembly should be replaced with a body appointed by the London boroughs.

The planning rules that protected the views of the Palace of Westminster and St Paul’s Cathedral should be reinstated.

We have replaced these with:

Over the next year the Mayor should prioritise the recruitment of extra police officers.

Motorcyclists should be allowed to travel on bus lanes.

The London Development Agency should be used to promote ethnic diversity.

Prepay Oyster card users should have unlimited travel on the buses within an hour for a single charge.

Why have we made these changes?

Some people have commented that statement on Community Support Officers could be read to mean supporting extra police officers, rather than PCSOs who do not have the same powers. In addition, while the candidate Boris Johnson does not support extra PCSOs on the streets, he does support 440 extra PCSOs on the buses. In order to avoid confusion we thought it best if we swapped it with a less ambiguous statement on extra police numbers.

The skyscrapers, St. Pauls and Parliament and replacing the Assembly question each had two things in common. Firstly, only one or two parties actually agreed with the statement. Secondly, they are all regarded as relatively unimportant issues by the 7,000+ people who have already used the Vote Match.

By contrast, the replacement statements on motorcycle lanes, prepay Oyster and the London Development Agency are issues which divide the candidates more distinctly, are issues which we feel more directly affect voters’ daily lives and are relatively major issues in the election campaign.

Are you going to make any more changes?

We hope not, at least not for this election. We think version 1 was a pretty good first attempt and are only changing it now because it is still relatively early in the election campaign.

No tool like this can ever claim to be absolutely perfect and trying too hard to make it so would be futile. But we hope you will agree these changes make Vote Match better.

Longer term, we have received some other feedback on this project which we hope to incorporate in future projects but for various reasons are unable to incorporate here now. Rest assured we are keen to ensure Vote Match is as good as it can be and are keen to hear your views on how it can be improved.

John Rentoul - the Chief Political Commentator for the Independent on Sunday - describes Vote Match as “brilliant” and “a digital-democracy breakthrough.”

He has some criticisms:

The main defect is that there is no way of factoring in your opinion of the integrity and effectiveness of the candidates. The selection of issues is also contentious: I thought it was skewed towards the environmental. And the weighting could obviously be made more sophisticated.

On the integrity and effectiveness of the candidates, this is something which we are quite realistic about the limitations of a simple quiz like Vote Match. The weighting certainly could be more sophisticated, but Vote Match is designed to be simple for the average person in the street.

In terms of the questions being skewed towards environmental issues, 7 out of the 25 statements are related to the environment although that includes the statements about views of St. Pauls and Parliament, skyscrapers and the feeding of pigeons. We based the selection of statements partly on the opinion polls we could find on what Londoners consider to be important. According to a YouGov/ITN survey from December 2007, 42% of Londoners considered Congestion Charging to be an important issue, 41% were concerned with sanitation and street cleansing and 47% considered the environment to be an important topic.

Mark Hanson on the PR Media Blog describes Vote Match as “not perfect” but “a great guide.”

Finally another link from Wyn Davies at Analysing British Politics.  Thanks!

Keep those links coming - we are just a few hours away from hitting the 6,000 user mark.