Election Campaign Big Data – Disrupting Democracy

Create Election Campaign Using Big Data

Every vote counts, so the campaign motive is to connect and identify and motivate voters. Adopting sophisticated ‘big data' crunching techniques would help to increase voter turnout.

The political parties may analyze the new challenges and create potential policy solutions. They understand the power of the Internet to mobilize a large number of people to political action.

• Collect precise data about millions of people and supporters
• Data of undecided voters
• Targeted tailor-made chipper canvassers pound to voters doors with recited scripts.
• Call or text message or email voters about a political candidate
• Use tools to allow campaign managers to target individual voters with powerful and highly customized messages
• Predictive polls by TV channels fed out publicly
• Organize data by computer algorithms

Collecting Data

The election candidate already has data about target voters like voter's home address, voting history, party affiliation, and other data points like age, sex and location.
The data comes from electoral roll, state municipalities, national census department, third-party data brokers and social media marketing.

Barack Obama Election Campaign

The US President Barack Obama the first major political candidate to use big data in 2008 elections. He used a Twitter account to communicate his message to his millions of followers. His campaign used the ‘Donate Now' button in emails to obtain contributions from millions of supporters. His supporters called undecided voters to convert them to his side.

Free & Fair Elections

• Require transparency, equality, and honesty in campaigning
• Information Access to enable voters to make an informed decision
• Electoral authorities need to regulate and oversee processes, control electoral expenses and prevent campaigning prior to official electoral periods. They need to identify and track new technical practices, public-policy solutions, electoral regulations, and privacy laws thus to strengthen and defend citizen's rights.

Challenges

• The use of digital tools, procedures, and practices employed by candidates disrupt voter behavior.
• The digitized campaigns are decentralized and personalized. The big parties by investing in databases and marketing on social media platforms take advantage over their rivals.
• Identify emerging and recurring phenomena that abuse technologies
• The internet can be used to spew false information about candidates, suppress the vote, and affect the voter rolls and the election machinery of the state
• With the technology a new era of election meddling could start, helping one party over the other, thus disrupting democracy itself.

Software

i360 political campaigning software: It has been used successfully in Republican Party campaigns and boasts it holds data on 199 million US voters.