VoteSF’s Recommender
A tool to help easily connect San Francisco voters' issue preferences to candidates on the March 5th ballot.
This week, we’re launching an experimental new tool to help voters more easily parse out the candidates and propositions that best align with their politics. We’re calling it the Recommender.
We're super excited about this launch, since recommendations is the top-requested feature we got when chatting with voters across San Francisco. This is definitely still an imperfect tool, but we're hoping with your help (and feedback!) we can make it a useful resource for voters across the city.
The goal of the Recommender is to cut through the confusion of voting in San Francisco. It helps orient voters by giving you just enough information about where you land, and who you best align with in SF politics. Then, you can use this information to make better-aligned choices on all the races — not just the high profile ones.
An important note is that the Recommender isn't the final word on who you should vote for. Rather, you can think of it a bit like a waiter at a restaurant. If you’re not sure exactly what you’d like to order, you can tell the waiter what you like, and what you’re hoping to get out of your dinner. The waiter takes those preferences into account, and can recommend a dish or two.
At the end of the day, you’re still the one choosing your dish — or casting your vote. Which means you should still look at the menu, or read through the ballot. But our hope is that the Recommender will help you decode some of the political context around each candidate and issue so you can more easily make an informed choice, even if you’re not an expert on SF politics.
In this post, we’re going to run you through the basics:
Who the Recommender is for
Why it’s useful
How to use it
How we made it
Who should use the Recommender?
The short answer is: anyone who is interested in voting in San Francisco’s election this March can use the Recommender!
Obviously, though, some people will get more value from the Recommender than others. Most voters fall into one of four groups:
Now, we think that if you happen to be in the circled group — people who care about SF policies, but aren’t experts — that you’ll get the most out of using the Recommender.
For folks in that category, the Recommender is meant to help you overcome all the hurdles that stand in the way of voting on everything that’s on the ballot in front of you. Whether that’s knowing what all the races are, or understanding each candidates’ stances, there are a lot of steps to being able to cast an informed vote.
Hopefully, the Recommender helps take a road filled with twists and obstacles, and turns it into a quick, smooth ride. More importantly, we’ve done everything we can to make sure that the Recommender’s outputs are the same choices that you’d make if you had all the time and information in the world when casting your vote.
How do I use the Recommender?
Nice, we’ve convinced you to try out the Recommender! Now here’s how it’s going to work:
Go to https://recs.votesf.app/, and hit “Get Started”
You’ll enter a quiz that has 8 easy questions, each with 2-3 choices
Complete the quiz by selecting the political stance that best aligns with your preferences for each question (and if you don’t care about the issue it’s asking about, just select “Not Interested in This Issue”
Get your results!
It’s pretty straightforward — because we could all use a little more simplicity when it comes to voting.The questions will look a little something like this:
For a little more context, the Recommender breaks down the major policy issues in San Francisco into 8 main buckets:
Business
Education
Government (streamlining and process regulation)
Homelessness
Housing
Public safety
Transportation
Taxes
It then parses down those issues into a realistic spectrum of policy stances that we see amongst SF candidates, which is what you end up choosing from! The best part is that it’s all in plain, easy language.
How do I interpret my results?
Note: All of the screenshots here are of fake quiz results given for illustrative purposes, and don't necessarily represent the opinions or views of our team!
Once you’re done with your quiz, the Recommender will take you to the results page! This will start off with a big map of San Francisco’s politics — and show you where you are in it.
It’ll look a little something like this (and in case you’re wondering, we just used a series of random answers to generate this result):
This map is organized along two axes:
Progressive to Conservative (left to right)
Pro-Growth to Pro-Preservation (up to down)
Along these axes, you’ll see a few clusters of bubbles. Each bubble represents one of the local candidates running in this election, so this map will automatically give you a sense of the candidates that you’re politically closest to.
Then, as you scroll down the results page, you’ll get an organized breakdown of your recommendations, which will cover endorsers, candidates, and propositions.
Endorsers
An Endorser is any type of organization or individual that has made public endorsements of candidates or stances on propositions. Some notable examples in SF might include the SF League of Pissed Off Voters, or GrowSF.
Endorsers may seem like a weird recommendation, since you don’t actually vote on endorsers in any election. But, we think they’re a great place to start, since endorsements are so influential in local elections (and play a big role in determining the rest of your recommendations).
Endorsers are associated with the clusters that you see on the map. Your Endorser recommendations will show which political groups in SF are closest to your preferences.
Even though you don’t vote on these recommendations, they can help you contextualize your other results or act as a jumping off point for more of your own research! Endorsers often explain how and why they're making their recommendations, so you can check to see if their reasoning aligns with how you think about any given issue. Getting familiar with similar organizations can also provide more context to past and future elections, where you'll see a lot of the same names again.
Candidates
This is pretty straightforward — candidate recommendations are made for people whose political stances are most closely aligned with your quiz results.
The Recommender will make recommendations for every race that is on the ballot — starting from the Presidential primary, then moving down to California elections, and finally landing on SF’s local races. You’ll also see your recommended candidates’ Endorsers!
Propositions
Propositions are (in theory) simple. Rather than choosing from a lot of candidates, you only have to decide between voting yes or no.
These recommendations will be just as simple! You’ll either get a yes or no, with a list of the Endorsers that suggest your result.
How did we build the Recommender?
Note: There is a lot of fancy data science that goes into the Recommender, so this section will be slightly more technical than our usual writing. (But not too much.)
Step 1: Building a political map of SF
To create the Recommender, we had to start by creating a political map of SF and its candidates. That started by defining the main political issues in SF: one for each of the eight questions in the quiz.
Once we had defined those political issues, we used them to evaluate different candidates’ stances. We read through candidates’ websites, social media, questionnaires, and other materials to infer where on the political spectrum they each fall for each issue. That allowed us to create a dataset that reflected SF’s political landscape
But to turn that dataset into an easy-to-use map, we had to do some math. We used a PCA (principle component analysis) to turn these 8 dimensions of political preference into a two-dimensional graph. That’s how we ended up with the axes you see on the Recommender map!
Then, we used our dataset to place candidates onto that map, et voila! We came up with the map that you see at the top of your results page.
Step 2: Creating your Endorser recommendations
To create our Endorser recommendations, we first had to pull a pretty robust list of relevant organizations and people across SF. To first compile that list, we looked at who had added endorsements in the San Francisco Voter Information Pamphlet. Then, we supplemented that list with other people and organizations who were cited as endorsers on candidates’ websites.
This gave us a mix of voter guides, advocacy organizations, individuals, political clubs, and even political parties. We left out newspapers; even though they release endorsements, it is irregularly and are inconsistent. Otherwise, we included any endorser who had a consistent and demonstrated good faith effort to participate in SF politics.
Once we had a (long) list of Endorsers, we then classified them into one of three groups that corresponded with the clusters on our SF political map: progressive, moderate, and conservative. These classifications were done manually, using a combination of self-labeling, publicly stated policy stances, and close political alignment between different Endorsers.
This created three “sets” of Endorser recommendations. Based on the results of your quiz, you are recommended the set that most closely aligns with your political preferences!
Step 3: Creating your Candidate recommendations
We had two processes for creating candidate recommendations: one for national races, and one for local and state races.
Let’s start with local and state races. In simple terms, the Recommender assesses your political stance based on your quiz results, and then finds the candidates that are most politically similar to you.
In practice, this is slightly more involved, two-step method:
Use a method called cosine similarity to identify the candidates whose stances are best aligned with yours
Use endorsements counts from ideologically similar groups as tie-breakers when necessary
The cosine similarity analysis of course used the inferred stances that we assigned to each candidate based on their publicly available statements. We recognize that this isn’t a completely perfect process, so we reached out to each slate of candidates with our inferences. We’ve made sure that they have``` the chance to make any corrections they see fit, and will continue to do so.
National races are pretty straightforward. The Recommender starts by looking at your recommended Endorsers list. Then, it finds the national candidate that is most frequently endorsed by your recommended Endorsers.
Step 4: Creating your Proposition recommendations
The process for creating Prop recommendations looks a lot like the process for creating national candidate recommendations. First, we took a look at your Endorser recommendations. Then, the Recommender finds the stance on each prop that is most often supported by your recommended Endorsers!
We’d love your feedback!
This is just the first version of our Recommender, and it’s definitely a work-in-progress. We know it isn’t perfect, and we’d love your feedback in either our methods or your user experience! The best way to do that is to fill out our google form, or email us at contact@votesf.app.
One last thing to note: the Recommender will only show your most recent quiz result and recommendations! And unfortunately, we’re still working on an easy way to export your results.
That means that if you have multiple people taking turns using the Recommender on the same browser, you’ll want to manually save your results. The easiest way we’ve found to do that from your browser is to go to File —> Print —> More Settings —> Open PDF. That will create a PDF version of your results, which you can save to your computer.
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