FAQ

What is an election compass?
An election compass (or vote compass, vote guide, vote matcher) is a voting advice application (or voting aid application) that helps voters find a candidate or a party that stands closest to their preferences.

How does it work?
We present issues and you have to decide with which position you agree by clicking one of two buttons. After you made your decision either a red elephant (the symbol for the Republican party) or a blue donkey (the symbol for the Democratic party) will appear – indicating to which party/candidate your selected position belonged.

Do I have to pay for using Res Publica?
No, Res Publica is free to use.

Do I have to login to be able to use Res Publica?
No, login is not required.

Do you also have an app?
No, we don’t. We only offer the web application. But you can perfectly use it in the browser app on your mobile phone.

How do you make money with Res Publica?
We don’t. Res Publica was developed and is running without donations or ads. We don’t sell any data.

Who stands behind Res Publica?
Res Publica is a nonpartisan project. We – that is Christian and Lena – are two German STEM graduates, who live and work in Europe. We are passionate about U.S. Politics and the U.S. in general and work on this project in our free time.
Res Publica is not a service of the United States Government.

What can I do when I have technical problems?
Please contact us with any problems – we will do our best to correct them.

Why do you not simply embed Tweets, Instagram and Facebook posts and YouTube videos?
Too many MBs. We tried embedding in the beginning, but the performance of the website suffered too much.

What happens with the election compass results?
We don’t want to influence the election outcome. We will not disclose any trends we see on Res Publica to anyone.

Are you using Res Publica to influence my vote in any direction?
We do our best to be neutral when developing Res Publica. Of course everybody in our team has political opinions, but we do not use Res Publica to push you to align with our opinions. If you have the impression, anything we do or write here is biased or wrong, please let us know. We want Res Publica to be an information tool, not some campaign for our personal political views.

Is the Res Publica team Republican or Democratic?
We – that is Christian and Lena – have German citizenship and are not eligible to vote in the U.S. We are not members of any parties.
However, we of course have opinions about U.S. politics. And we have a good mix of opinions in our team!

Is what I see on the buttons of the election compass exact quotes from the nominees?
No. We summarize or abbreviate positions. Under “More Information” you can find our sources and find more granular information.

What are the shortcomings of the Election Compass?
– There is no functionality to emphasize issues that are of most importance to you.
– We only include the nominees from the Democratic and Republican Party in our election compass, but no other nominees (e.g. Green party).
– We limit the issues in the election compass and thus can only include a very small range of issues. But we provide the ‘All issues’ page to give you more information on issues.

For which elections do you create election compasses?
At the moment only gubernatorial and presidential elections. We are looking into the possibility to create election compasses for other elections too, e.g. mayoral elections.

I can’t find an election compass for my state?
We would love to create an election compass for every state, but we sadly don’t have the resources to do so.