You’re standing in the polling booth, crisp ballot paper in hand, a dozen or more names printed across it. Many of them you’ve never encountered before. The cross you put next to one of them, however, will shape the government for years to come. How do you choose?

It is a conundrum faced by voters in democratic elections all over the world. Usually it will come down to a combination of party loyalty, one or two memorable policies, and how you think your friends and family will vote. To politicians’ dismay, the electorate can be incredibly fickle, basing their decision on a candidate’s haircut or how attractive they are, a recent news story, or the desire to “send a message” to those in power. (Read more about how faces can change politics.)

Making an informed choice in the voting booth requires a great deal of investment – reading up on every candidate, weighing their relative merits against one another. Most people don’t have that kind of time. Voters in the world’s largest democratic elections in India, for example, had to choose from more than 8,039 candidates nationwide from 650 different parties in polling split into eight phases.

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● Lies, propaganda and fake news: A challenge for our age

● The hidden psychology of voting

● Why we need to reinvent democracy

With the US Presidential elections looming in 2020 and a bitter general election scheduled in the UK in December, the task facing voters is unlikely to get any easier. But can technology help?

After all, machines make all kinds of difficult decisions for us. Recommendation engines find us the cheapest flights, the best car insurance, the optimum mobile phone package, serve us advertisements for things we didn’t know we wanted, find us books to read, movies to watch, suggest gift ideas, and curate playlists of our favourite artists. We even let machines shortlist our romantic prospects. So can artificial intelligence find our perfect match when it comes to political candidates?