The Wahl-O-Mat for the federal election is online. It shows the undecided where they stand politically. This is how the online tool works.
The Wahl-O-Mat for the federal election is online. Three weeks before the polls on September 26, voters can use the tool to check how much agreement they have with the parties’ election programs. That is the most important information.
There are currently three different Wahl-O-Mats: In addition to the offer for the Bundestag election, two regional Wahl-O-Mats are available because Berlin and Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania will elect their new state governments on September 26th. The Wahl-O-Mat is also available free of charge for and.
This is how the Wahl-O-Mat works
The Bundestag-Wahl-O-Mat consists of 38 theses elaborated by young voters, which have to be answered with “agree”, “neutral” or “disagree”. The tool then compares the answers with those of the parties. If you want, you can weight the topics that are particularly close to your heart after answering. At the end, users receive a percentage result that shows the agreement with the respective parties.
If you are interested in details, you can read the reasons given by the parties for each individual topic or change the weighting of the answers afterwards under the point “Tuning”.
The history of the Wahl-O-Maten and its competition
The Wahl-O-Mat is an offer from the Federal Agency for Civic Education (bpb). The tool went online for the 2002 Bundestag election for the first time and has since been available as a decision-making aid for more than 50 elections. In 2019, the Volt Germany party sued the Cologne Administrative Court against the restriction of the number of eligible parties to eight in the course of the European elections and was right. The bpb has reacted and in the current version provides a “Select all parties” button.
Although the Wahl-O-Mat from bpb is the most far-reaching tool of its kind, there are alternatives: For example, it has been available since 2017. Its strengths are short explanatory videos that explain individual topics in an informative way. The Free University of Amsterdam has been available since 2007 and, unlike Wahl-O-Maten, does not take into account some smaller parties.
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