This paper analyses the representativeness of the users of the HelpMeVote VAA deployed in the run up to the general election in Iceland in April 2013. We compare the demographic distribution of the HelpMeVote users to those of the general population, their self-proclaimed voting intentions to those in election-polls with random samples and their ideological values and attitudes to those of the respondents in the Icelandic Election Study (ICENES), a telephone survey among a simple random sample of the population carried out after the election. Based on these results, we provide an estimate of the reliability of data from VAAs for research and inference to the general public. We also postulate possible methods for meeting the challenges to representativeness faced by researchers working with such data. An attempt is also made to assess the accuracy of the voting advice given.
