I Swiped Right And Matched With Bernie Sanders As My Presidential Candidate

Picking whom to vote for in this crazy presidential election year would be a lot easier if it were more like Tinder, right?

Thankfully, people who know how to code had the same thought. Last week, Tinder launched "Swipe the Vote," a campaign where you can swipe on different issues to be matched with the candidate closest to your political thoughts.

Tinder partnered with Rock the Vote and worked with another app, Voter, to make the product. Tinder's Swipe the Vote includes a handful of questions about political topics, like same-sex marriage and the death penalty. You swipe right or left if you agree or disagree with a question.

The app analyzes your answers and shows which candidate you most closely relate to.

As of Friday, Tinder announced Bernie Sanders had the most matches with 37.8 percent. Hillary Clinton was close behind at 37.6 percent -- losing by just 200 matches.

On the Republican side, Ted Cruz had the most matches with 14.3 percent of the vote, and overall, men were more likely to match Republican than women; almost 20 percent of men matched with Cruz while just 8.5 percent of women did.

I spoke about the Voter app with Hunter Scarborough, its founder. He said he made it mostly for himself, explaining,

I just did not have time to do personal research or... the patience to do personal research, and I didn't want to vote based on a sound bite from a newspaper or an uncle or something.

The app does all the research work for you, and it only takes a few minutes to swipe through the questions.

A cool part of the app is it gives you quick arguments for both sides of the questions if you're not totally sure how you feel about an issue. You can also undo, skip and redo questions, and there's an option to mark how much an issue matters to you.

I swiped through and ended up matching with Sanders. That was a little surprising as, to be honest, I planned to vote for Hillary Clinton when the primary vote hits New Jersey in June.

Scarborough said he wanted this app to focus on the policy stances of candidates since we are already bombarded with their personalities in the mainstream media. This probably accounts for why I matched with Bernie. While I personally feel for Hillary's practical personality, the idealistic part of me agrees more with Bernie's stances.

One thing's for sure: In no world will I be voting for Ted Cruz.

Voter launched last fall and passed 20,000 users in the first four weeks. It's releasing a new set of questions this month and plans to expand to have matches for local elections -- which I would definitely appreciate before hitting the voting booth since, admittedly, I know a lot more about the presidential election than whatever's going on at the local level.

Any way you can learn more about candidates is extremely important, and apps like these could be super useful in motivating our generation to actually get out there and make informed voting decisions.