Thumbs up for Google's voting tool

Google Australia engineering director Alan Noble's tool Cluey Voter, which aims to make voting preferences a little easier for normal people, gets two thumbs up from me.

Noble today released the web application specifically designed for the South Australian election due to take place on 20 March 2010. The tool allows people to say how much they support certain groups, and then spits out a page outlining how voters should number their preferences.

Some might say this is just dumbing down society, others might be concerned that the person who wrote the app might skew the results towards parties they favour. And since everyone has a political agenda, I suppose it's possible.

But when I think of myself on polling day, desperately wanting to make my vote count, and not wanting to spend hours figuring out which numbers to put in the boxes, such a tool could be immensely useful.

And if there were multiple tools flying around, and you didn't want your vote to be skewed, you could always run your preferences through them all. So well done Google. That, for me, is government 2.0 thinking.