SAN DIEGO — With less than 24 hours remaining before his first voting experience, 19-year-old Miguel Navarrete was still puzzling over how John F. Kerry and John Edwards compared on the issues of importance to him: crime, drugs and education.
"Hey, I'm a college student," said Navarrete, a psychology major at San Diego State University. "So, of course, I only do things at the last moment." And so, like an increasing number of members of his computer-savvy but time-pressed generation, Navarrete turned to the Internet.
In this political season of blogs and cyber-fundraising, a new kind of website is making its mark: sites that, with a few keystrokes, allow a voter to have candidates ranked or graded on how well they conform to the voter's needs and views.
In Navarrete's case, the site was devised by San Diego-based Idego Methodologies -- www.visiontreesoftware.com. Loaded with the views of presidential candidates on 15 issues, it prepares a numerical ranking based on input from the site user.
"You're seeing the future, man," said Kirk Howard, 20, a business major. "Young people don't have time to listen to speeches or collect the newspapers."
Earlier in the campaign, Howard compared Democrats Kerry and Edwards to see how they matched with his political beliefs and interests. They both matched up evenly.
If select-a-candidate sites are the future, they are arriving in a hurry. They are the latest attempt to get young voters interested in politics by making information accessible, bite-size and interactive.
Idego's "voter's choice" is a newcomer to the field, which includes www.selectsmart.com/president and AOL's www.presidentmatch.com, which attracted 545,000 visitors in January alone.
Jan Schaffer, executive director of the Institute for Interactive Journalism at the University of Maryland's Philip Merrill College of Journalism, thinks the sites may have found a way to do something that has eluded newspapers and television: make politics interesting.
"I don't see these as dumbing-down democracy," Schaffer said. "They're another entry point to help citizens get involved, get engaged in the election. And for many, it's fun."
There can be surprises, she said. "Sometimes, people realize they don't really agree with the candidate they thought they liked."
AOL spokeswoman Katie Griesbeck said that Kerry campaign workers have acknowledged using the presidentmatch.com website to see if they were compatible with their candidate. "They found out they're a fit," she said.
