Vote compass?

The CBC has their Vote Compass up again. They were widely mocked last time and the same is happening again.

The problem is quite simple: What happens if you answer neutral on every single question? This happens:

Okay, now note which party shows up as closest to the "center". It's the Greens. So anyone answering as I did should be closer to the Greens than any other party. Except that they're not:

How did that happen?

I won't be coy, it happened because the software the CBC has provided is biased in favour of the Liberals.

Not, though, for the reasons you might think. I don't think it was designed to produce such a result. I think it happened because the people who put the thing together are unaware of their own biases. To fully explain would be a long exercise so I'll just give a teaser.

Here is one of the questions you are asked to answer by the Vote Compass. It's a stupid question.

The right to protest is more important than public order.

The problem is that the statement has no meaningful content. All protest tends to upset the public order. Protests slow traffic, block sidewalks, make noise. The issue is that some protestors feel they have the right to disrupt other people's lives in aggressive ways by blocking roads, destroying public property, invading the private lives of public figures and even by threatening people who disagree with them. Every single one of these things is a serious, go-to-jail crime. And yet a number of people in the political class think that is just fine. They feel that these crimes can be excused because they reflect the passion of the protestors.

Now that is an interesting issue but no one outside of the narrow class of people who are intensely interested in politics will have the vaguest notion of what "public order" means here. This entire "Vote Compass"exercise was created by people who simply do not speak the same language as the rest of the population does.