Senkyo.com and The Kyoto Shimbun Jointly Launch "Shiga Gubernatorial Election 2026 Vote Matching" for July 5 Election

Ichi-ni Inc. (CEO: Taku Takahata, Shibuya, Tokyo), operator of Senkyo.com, announced the launch of the "Shiga Gubernatorial Election 2026 Vote Matching" service on June 18, in collaboration with The Kyoto Shimbun.

The "Shiga Gubernatorial Election 2026 Vote Matching" is a service that measures the degree of alignment with candidates based on user responses to questions on policies directly affecting daily life, for the purpose of choosing who to vote for in the Shiga gubernatorial election, announced on June 18 with voting on July 5. We hope you will use it as a reference when deciding your vote.

This time, we have prepared 14 questions. The questions were designed jointly by Senkyo.com and The Kyoto Shimbun, who also conducted a survey of the candidates, and the service was created based on their responses. The questions cover a wide range of topics, including key election issues such as the new "transportation tax," evaluation of multiple terms, and the state of prefectural governance. Each question includes an explanatory text outlining the issue, as well as its "merits" and "demerits," to provide users with material for their judgment.

Both users and candidates answer the questions on a five-point scale (Agree, Somewhat Agree, Neither, Somewhat Disagree, Disagree), from which the degree of policy agreement is measured.

Senkyo.com's "Vote Matching" service is not only implemented for national elections like the House of Representatives and House of Councillors elections but also for local elections such as gubernatorial and mayoral races. The service surpassed 4 million uses during the 2025 House of Councillors election, and the cumulative number of uses has exceeded 10 million.

The matching degree is calculated using the "distance" between the candidate's answer and the user's choice. For example, if a user selects "Agree" for a question, Candidate A who also chose "Agree" will receive more points than Candidate B who chose "Somewhat Agree," as Candidate A's answer is closer.

Senkyo.com aims to assist voters and increase voter turnout by making election information easy to understand. We hope to help many voters and ask for your anticipation for future Vote Matching services.

About Ichi-ni Inc. Ichi-ni Inc. operates Japan's largest political and election portal site, "Senkyo.com," used by approximately 41 million users. The company manages a database of domestic election and candidate information. By building a platform for elections and politics and maintaining information transparency, we support an environment where voters can more easily participate in politics.