
Trustworthy Voting Advice Applications
An ethical assessment of several VAAs throughout Europe for their compliance with the Ethics Guidelines for Trustworthy AI

Voting Advice Applications (VAAs) are increasingly popular throughout Europe. While commonly portrayed as impartial tools to measure issue agreement, their developers must take several design decisions at each step of the design process. Such decisions may include the selection of issues to incorporate into a questionnaire, the placement of candidates or parties on a political spectrum, or the algorithm measuring the distance between user and candidate. These decisions must be made with great care, as they can cause substantial differences in the resulting list of recommendations.
As there is no known ground truth, by which to measure different VAA designs, it is imperative that their design follows guidelines and best practices of pro-ethical design. Similarly, as VAAs aim to directly inform voter decisions in a democratic election, users must be able to trust the fulfillment of these guidelines based on the information available to them.
Firstly, we conduct an ethics assessment of several VAAs used in European countries, representing different design strategies. This assessment focuses on trustworthiness in the eyes of the electorate, focusing on user-centric documentation. By using the Ethics Guidelines for Trustworthy AI, we refer to a framework that is acknowledged by the democratic institutions of the countries hosting the VAAs and the respective elections, contributing to the democratic validity of a normative analysis of tools embedded in electoral processes.
Secondly, we identify the abstract criteria that a trustworthy VAA must fulfill according to the EGTAI, and evaluate a representative set of VAAs within Europe (StemWijzer, Kieskompas What2Vote, Smartvote, Wahl-O-Mat, Aftonbladets valkompass, HS Vaalikone and SVT Nyheters valkompass) accordingly.
Thirdly, we present a list of recommendations based on these issues to contribute to future VAA development efforts.
This project relates to the call topic “ELS evaluation projects”. We evaluative the implementation and adherence of VAAs to the Ethics Guidelines for Trustworthy Artificial Intelligence.
Stockinger, E., Maas, J., Talvitie, C. et al. Trustworthiness of voting advice applications in Europe. Ethics Inf Technol 26, 55 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10676-024-09790-6
The project was presented at the Digital Democracy Workshop (2023) as well as at the Workshop on Co-Creating the Future: Participatory Cities and Digital Governance (2023), at the 1st Twin Workshop on Ethics of Smart Cities and Smart Societies (2023) as well as at the HumanE AI Conference (2022).
A short video summary and an extended talk from the Workshop on Co-Creating the Future, can be found on YouTube.