VoteMate is a free, non-partisan AI guide for Australian elections. You write what matters in your own words. It ranks parties in your electorate by how closely their published positions match that text, and it shows the citations. It is not affiliated with any political party, candidate or government agency.
Who runs this
VoteMate is published by Evanscorp Pty. Limited, a privately owned software company in Wollongong, New South Wales. Evanscorp is an independent software vendor (ABN 46 088 452 804). It is not a political organisation, campaign, lobby, or government body, and it does not take political advertising.
The first election on VoteMate is the Victorian state election on Saturday 28 November 2026. Later elections (NSW, then federal) are planned if this Victorian run proves itself.
How matching works
VoteMate is an adaptive interview, not a billed chatbot and not a yes/no menu of party slogans. You keep your full wording. A one-word note gets a clarifying question. An essay or a worked example that already has a direction may need few or none.
- Party stances come only from a citation store of published pamphlets and public pages. The model may pick existing citation IDs. It must not invent a plank, quote, or URL.
- Ranking uses what you actually wrote, weighted by the order you raised it. Parties with no overlapping cited position are skipped, not guessed.
- Silence is a finding: if no published stance overlaps your note, VoteMate says so rather than treating that as a failed match.
- Conflicts are shown as well as affinities. When a published position goes against a concern you named, that trade-off is called out so you can see you would be voting against it.
- Victorian ranking uses issues this parliament can decide. Explicitly federal (or local) points are tagged out of the Vic score and labelled as another level of government, not as Victorian silence.
- When two parties are indistinguishable on what you already wrote, VoteMate may ask one extra question drawn from a pamphlet issue that actually splits them. It will not invent a difference to force a rank order.
This is not Vote Compass. Parties do not set the agenda here: issues you raise still count even when they never campaigned on them.
Sources and limits
Sitting members were compiled 27 August 2026 from Victorian Electoral Commission district and region pages. Party stances are cited from the published pages listed in the Victorian 2026 policy store. There is no credibility engine in this build (no scoring of whether a party later kept a promise). 2026 candidates are not published until nominations close on 9 November; sitting-member affiliation is not treated as candidacy.
Technology
The site is a C# API on Azure with a TypeScript page that uses Fluent Web Components for cards, buttons, and the district picker. Matching is retrieve-then-cite: voter notes and pamphlet rows are embedded, a language model hosted on Azure OpenAI may select only allowlisted citation IDs, and the rank cards render those citations. Voter text is treated as untrusted data. There is no advertising, and the interview is not a metered chatbot bill.