Super Duper Tuesday is less than two weeks away, and lots of people have been clicking on select-a-candidate quizzes like this or this or this or this or this or this.

Do these quizzes have any impact on voting decisions? No one knows. Countless people take these polls, and it’s possible that they have some impact, but in the grand scheme of things no one’s paying much attention to them. Which raises some interesting questions.

How accurate are these polls? Do they truly reflect the candidates’ positions, or are they skewed in some fashion?

In politics, the youth vote and the undecided vote tend to be two voting blocs that candidates covet most. In this Presidential year, I think the undecided bloc is smaller than usual, but the youth vote is looking to be significant.

Do young voters, who are plugged into the grid, use these sorts of quizzes to help solidify their voting choices?

And what about computer-savvy supporters of a particular candidate? How difficult would it be to whip up a quiz that, regardless of the answers one places into the Web form, skews the answers toward their particular candidate? Not difficult at all.

Maybe quizzes like these are utterly insignificant. Maybe quizzes like these are startlingly accurate and influential.

The only thing we know for sure is that they’re out there and getting traffic.

This entry was posted on Sunday, January 27th, 2008 at 10:58 am and is filed under Internet Stuff.