Busola Politică
The first compass we built, and the instrument every other one grew out of.
- Year
- 2024
- Services
- Voting compass · Research · Data analysis
- Role
- Design, build, fieldwork
- Platform
- freshvote.roArchived — a frozen copy of the original build, no longer collecting responses.
Archived — a frozen copy of the original build, no longer collecting responses.
The challenge
First-time voters have nowhere to start
At a first vote, the distance between "I have an opinion" and "I know who I align with" is enormous, and the sources are either partisan or unreadable. FreshVOTE began as a project aimed at exactly that audience, funded by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Netherlands.
What we built
An electoral compass built as a master’s thesis
Built end to end in Next.js and React, with the database and delivery on Cloudflare Pages and D1, and the response analysis in Python. The matching model and the analysis of the 2024 presidential election formed the master’s thesis behind the project.
What came out
The engine everything else runs on
The architecture written here — items, axis scoring, profile page, anonymised collection — is the one Busola București, NYC Political Compass and Busola Media were built on. The domain left the studio’s hands in 2026 and is today used by an unrelated third party; a frozen copy of the November 2024 build still runs, with response collection switched off.