One-stop website to get all the election info you need
If you’re having trouble keeping up with all the individual candidates and issues in the federal election campaign, consider paying a visit to a made-in-B.C. website that makes it easy to compare platforms and contenders.
VoteMate.org is a non-partisan repository of information on all candidates and party platforms right across Canada, and available in both French and English.
The one-stop-shop for undecided voters is the creation of 20-year-old Vancouver man Laef Kucheran.
He first launched VoteMate for the 2017 provincial election to help encourage younger people to participate in the democratic process — even though he himself was too young to vote at the time.
“It’s a website, so there’s a certain sort of person who will use a website, but I do have people who will use it from all age brackets,” said Kucheran.
“I have had people in their 60s and 70s who have found it quite useful to have a website that puts it all there for them, because if you’re not technologically savvy, it’s a lot easier to have everything in one place rather than having to Google something and go to five different websites with five different designs.”
Kucheran, who’s a web designer by trade, runs VoteMate as a labour of love.
“It’s been five years and I’ve done thousands of hours of work on it and it’s always been volunteer (work). It’s something that I really care about. I think something like VoteMate is genuinely useful to people,” he said.
Traffic on VoteMate in past elections has ranged from 50,000 to 100,000 individual users, but this race seems to be a little different.
Since the writ was dropped Aug. 16,
VoteMate has already had visits from 25,000 people, said Kucheran, “and that’s even
before Labour Day, when people are going to become much more interested.”