Votematch is back: which party most closely matches your policy preferences?

Following its British debut in the London and then European elections, Votematch is now up and running for the 2010 general election. The idea is a simple one – you answer 30 questions about different policies (less in Scotland or Wales because of devolution) and the site then tells you how closely your answers match those of different parties.

It’s got quite a few nice touches which show how the team have learnt both from experiences elsewhere, particularly the phenomenally successfully version used by one in three voters in Holland, and from their past experience in Britain. For example, you can pick which issues are most important to you and they then get an extra weighting in the results. You can also pick if there are any parties which you would never vote for, and they get excluded.

The results can then be shared via Facebook, Twitter and blogs plus you are given links to further information about the parties, your constituency and who is standing in it. It all makes the site slot neatly into the network of political information and education sites that have grown up in Britain.

There is also a version of the quiz being deployed by the Telegraph which it turns on its general election coverage, which will feature extra questions and benefit from the Telegraph website’s high traffic levels.

Although there was a fair amount of controversy over some of the questions and scoring used in the London elections, what I saw of the questions at the launch yesterday was pretty good. The answers, and further explanatory text, have all been provided by the parties themselves. No one set of questions is going to perfectly match what everyone thinks should be the choices between parties, but this system so far seems to do a pretty good job.

The site is at www.VoteMatch.org.uk.

If you give it a whirl, why not share your thoughts on it in the comments below?