It’s a pleasant enough break from work, but problematic as a heuristic device. Social science tells us that when we examine information about candidates, we tend to look more for rationalizations than guidance. So while such a quiz may deliver an accurate match (depending on how well the questions have been constructed and the answers have been based on the available evidence), the players/prospective voters have to be willing and able to reconcile the results with their existing preferences in order for the game to serve the cause of voter education.

Suppose, for instance, that an undecided voter takes one of the quizzes and discovers that the candidate he is in greatest agreement with is Dennis Kucinich. Second place goes to Rudy Giuliani. And Bill Richardson gets the bronze (not Mitt Romney, as he is wont to characterize his election finishes these days). If the undecided voter (okay, I admit it’s me) is the slightest bit serious about using this device as a voter guide, the first thing he will want to do is fiddle with the resulting list of candidates so it comes closer to his own sense of who his favorites are. For starters, the voter needs to adjust the suggested matches to the current roster of candidates—none of the sites has been particularly timely in striking the names of candidates who have exited the races. The more serious intellectual effort, however, lies ahead.

Happily, some of the current crop of online political match games feature “sliders,” those digital markers that allow a user to move across a continuous scale with the mouse or arrow keys to see where the candidates fall in the spectrum of opinion on certain issues. The beauty of sliders in this context is their capacity to serve as mirrors for our preference-result reconciliation thought process: in seeing what moves bring me closer to the candidate I’m most leaning toward, I can delve into my preferences, and reflect on what issues matter to me relative to the others. I discovered that, for me, reducing the weight of importance placed on the experience issue yielded a more amenable result. The question asked me to choose between legislative and executive experience; in opting for mayors and governors over senators and representatives, I had boosted the above trio of candidates. In sliding the weight on the experience scale downward, I was playing and learning at the same time, something software excels at delivering in its best manifestations.

Sliders can illuminate the logical consequences of our choices. But there are other problems with the current crop of match games. Confining inputs to issue positions is constraining because, as Robert Reich pointed out recently, presidential leadership ought to encompass the redefining of issues and the linkages among them. More importantly, when we vote, we are choosing among people, not engaging in direct democracy. We vote for the candidate who best wins our admiration, respect, and trust. Sometimes that occurs because he or she takes a position on an issue antithetical to our own, but in a way that evinces character. Votehelp.org, which presents the best match game of the current lot, includes a “personality rating” appendix that brings this dimension of our pending decision into the open, where we can deliberate upon it.

In a few weeks, our actual range of choices likely will be narrowed to the future nominees. As the quizzes (finally, hopefully) adjust their rosters, I hope they add video clips from stump speeches so that we can read body language and voice inflection along with the text of issue positions. With only two candidates to choose between, voters may be more disposed to watch videos and answer questions about leadership. The richer the information available, the better their match-game deliberations will be.

Michael Cornfield is Vice-President of Research and Media Strategy at 720 Strategies.