Did boards help you decide for the GE?

biko

Was boards complicit in making your mind up? Or did you decide using information mainly from other sources?
Did the GE11 forum help things?

NothingMan

I haven't voted yet, who should I vote for?

derfderf

I'd say boards helped confirm my choice, rather than decided for me.

Squirm

I made my decision based on information from other sources. The majority of the threads relating to the GE that I took part in or followed were more focused on other people's opinions on political matters, rather than actually, reliable, information, with links. I found votomatic.ie an interesting site though, although my mind was already made up when I found it and completed their questionnaire.

Dermo

I actively read and did a little participating on boards but it had absolutely no impact on who I was voting for. where's my option?

delta_bravo

Very skewed options there in your poll.

NothingMan

Squirm wrote: »

I found votomatic.ie an interesting site though, although my mind was already made up when I found it and completed their questionnaire.

Thank you, I'm apparently voting labour with a side of Fine Gael. Is there anything an internet questionnaire can't do?

jonnysimples

Boards played a small part. I found it useful when trying to consider things from a different perspective and for presenting issues that I may not have considered. I mainly relied on other, more objective sources to try and make my decision though.

nacho libre

According to votomatic.ie: I'm torn between Fine Gael and the Labour Party. I'm also close to Sinn Féin.

Dwaegon

The GE helped me decide what to vote for on this threads poll.

sidneykidney

The idiocy of past governments confirmed my choice in who i voted for today.

Sanjuro

To be honest, I cant say one specific media source influenced my decision more than any other. Since it's been practically impossible to avoid coverage of the whole... clusterfuck... over the last few weeks, there have been many factors that influenced my decision. Certainly, discussions on boards made me stop and think. But at the end of the day, I made up my mind based on different factors.

FreudianSlippers

Boards had literally no impact on my vote.



But that's ok

seamus

While boards didn't make me decide, a couple of points made in various parts of boards had me investigating other sources with the result that I completely changed my vote.

hondasam

boards had no impact in making my decision. I always knew where my vote was going.

Smcgie

seamus wrote: »

While boards didn't make me decide, a couple of points made in various parts of boards had me investigating other sources with the result that I completely changed my vote.

Wooooooo... well I've got sky plus

TPD

Boards played a small part in making up my mind, and deciding not to vote.

:pac:

ejmaztec

All Boards did was to confirm that there are still people willing to vote for FF, despite what FF have done, and despite admitting that in the past, they voted for FF candidates who they knew were fucking useless, but felt that they had no choice but to vote for the party.

bobblepuzzle

This thread should be moved to the Politics forum :pac:

Wolfe Tone

I would hope no one would base their vote on the hive of misinformation which is the politics forum.

Mr. Spock

God, I sure hope no one took advice on how to vote from a freaking forum

Scarydoll

Nope, I already had my mind made up for who I wanted to vote for.

squod

It helped a bit. The ballot paper put in front of me today was a shock. Not many decent candidates. Wonder if I should run meself sometime in the future.

My name is URL

The Boards vote yokemajig kind of helped me decide in what order to vote, and who not to give any prefs to. I probably would have marked more boxes on the ballot paper otherwise. It's a great initiative in general, and deserves to be praised.

Agonist

If there was an option Boards discussions helped me decide who to vote for I might have chosen it. I thought the ballot papers on the \vote site were brilliant, with the links to The Journal's profiles. With so many candidates it was really useful.

It didn't change the way I voted but helped me confirm what I already thought.

Nadser

hondasam wrote: »

boards had no impact in making my decision. I always knew where my vote was going.

Me too, although I did find the discussions interesting and the general election simulator

ilovesleep

I found boards.ie very helpful. In some way it has influenced how I voted but not majorly.

I found boards.ie very educational. Im so angry as to what fianna fail has done. The way they handled the boom, the bust, then selling us into slavery to the banks for decades. SF was promising an 'easy' route of separating banking debt from sovereign debt, and I would have given SF a number 1 for that reason, but didn't. Scofflaw in politics has been fantastic (he/she knows his stuff). Its too late for a banking default. Unfortunatly we have no other choice but to go down the route that FF led us (fcuk you FF).

I found the boards.ie mock voting very helpful. Also it was great to have a thread in one on all the candidates in my constituency. I wrote down all the names and looked up their websites at my leisure instead of waiting for leaflets to arrive in the post.

Well done boards.ie. And to Scofflaw - love you lots.

OPENROAD

:eek: Good God, No ! :eek::D

df1985

Boards made me aware of certain policies of parties that I hadnt picked up on previously, and helped sort of "confirm" my choice.

I took everything with a pinch of salt though, for all ye know you could be reading enda kenny or gilmore posting on here!

mesosplody

Are you trying to verify the poll as a usable tool to monitor/influence voters of a certain demographic? I will admit if you can prove that it was accurate in predicting an outcome or it did cause changes in voting then I'd imagine it could be a big moneymaker in the future but I find it a bit shameless to exploit boards users in this manner. I'm guessing you were asked to start this thread by the originators of the poll? I suspected something like this was going on when I first saw the poll now I'm convinced.

Iwannahurl

I'd be surprised if Boards had any measurable influence.

I found the GE Poll in particular to be unreliable and unrepresentative. It gave a very misleading impression. I know of at least one candidate who urged contacts on their mailing list to register on Boards in order to influence the poll for their constituency.

Boards members constitute a self-selecting sample, and that is inherently biased and unrepresentative.

gurramok

A thread in the GE forum helped me decide who to vote for, an economist who was running. He ended up getting about 6% of the vote

Seeing threads on boards brought "Ming" to my attention, haddn't heard of him before, so I checked him out, anyway No 1 came in!.