Bundestag election: Alternatives to the Wahl-O-Mat
The Wahl-O-Mat uses the parties' election programs to provide users with results. However, there are also alternatives that pursue other approaches.
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The Wahl-O-Mat is an established tool before elections in Germany to find out which parties' election platforms best suit your preferences. However, there are also other tools on the subject that take a look at the past to help you see whether you agree with the decisions already made by the parties.
The Wahl-O-Mat tool has been offered by the Federal Agency for Civic Education since 2002 and is designed to show your own political affinity with the parties in the running. You can answer 38 given theses with "agree", "disagree", "neutral" or "skip thesis". You can also mark theses that seem important to you and thus play a greater role in the final weighting. You are then informed of the result with the help of a calculation model.
The alternatives with a different approach
DeinWal, for example, is a tool. It allows you to replay the votes of the last legislative period (2021-2025). You select "Yes", "No" or "Abstain" for the questions that were voted on in the Bundestag and are shown which parties voted the same way. At the end, you are then shown the percentage of how strongly you agree with the individual parties on the 23 questions.
Real-O-Mat works in a similar way. Here too, decisions from the last legislative period are taken as a basis. The possible answers here are "yes, I agree", "no, that goes too far for me" and "no, that's not enough for me". As with the Wahl-O-Mat, you can also give more weight to individual of the 20 theses in order to influence the final result. In addition, you can compare the different answers of the parties and read their reasons, a function that DeinWal lacks.
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AI can also help
Another way to get information on the parties' positions is the AI-supported Wahl-Chat. This chat bot allows you to interact with the parties' election programs and ask questions on topics that are important to you personally. The basis for this is provided by the AI models GPT-4o and -4o Mini from OpenAI.
Once you have received an answer to your question, you can also have the position of the questioned party classified. This means that you are shown the feasibility, short-term vs. long-term effects and a conclusion. It is then also possible to find out how the party has behaved in recent votes on this topic and what the sources for the AI's answer are.
Two developers of this AI chat bot were guests on our AI Update podcast and explained how they came to develop the AI tool. "We had the problem when we used the Wahl-O-Mat that some of the theses either didn't apply to us or we thought to ourselves, I'd have to do some research first," explains Michel Schimpf.
Alternativen zum Wahl-O-Mat (5 Bilder)
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)Further election tools:
(tlz)
