Voting recommendation

The smartvote voting recommendation offers voters the opportunity to directly compare themselves with the political positions of the candidates by answering the smartvote questionnaire. Individual questions that are particularly important to voters can be weighted additionally.

The method used is the so-called ‘city block’ model. The following document contains a detailed methodological description of how the voting recommendation is calculated.

Method description: Voting recommendation (in German)

Note:

There are various ways of calculating the degree of agreement – i.e. the political proximity between voters and candidates. The percentage agreement therefore depends on the calculation formula used.

Until 2025, the comparison of voters' and candidates' responses was still based mathematically on the Euclidean distance formula (the straight-line distance between two points in a multidimensional space). The Euclidean distance is the square root of the sum of the squared differences.