Wednesday, March 30, 2011

CBC's The National addresses Bias in its "Voting Compass"

A few days ago, I wrote an article about my feeling that the CBC Voting Compass for the upcoming election is biased.

Tonight, on the CBC National News, they did a story on the voting compass addressing this very issue. They say so far 800,000 people have taken the test. Oddly, the creators of the site maintain that this tool is not meant to show them how to vote, but rather is simply to show them where the parties stand.

During the piece, Ioanna Roumeliotis interviewed some students to see if they were surprised. Many were. Some thought they were Conservative, others thought they were NDP. However, of all the people whose response was different than expected, none turned out to be Conservative. Most of the time, they were told they were Liberal.

After the main report, Peter Mansbridge said the CBC asked party strategists from each party to do the test and evaluate it. He said they will air their response sometime later this week. That should be something to look forward to.

As I mentioned before, the main reason this is concerning to Catholics is that we are obliged to vote for good moral decisions, by attempting to reduce or eliminate things like abortion, same-sex marriage, embryonic destruction of any kind, sexual morals, etc. We must also strive to keep a government which promotes the common human good and offers appropriate social services. However, the first category trumps the second.

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