Voter Surveillance
There hasn’t been that much written about surveillance and big data being used to manipulate voters. In Data and Goliath, I wrote:
Unique harms can arise from the use of surveillance data in politics. Election politics is very much a type of marketing, and politicians are starting to use personalized marketing’s capability to discriminate as a way to track voting patterns and better “sell” a candidate or policy position. Candidates and advocacy groups can create ads and fund-raising appeals targeted to particular categories: people who earn more than $100,000 a year, gun owners, people who have read news articles on one side of a particular issue, unemployed veterans…anything you can think of. They can target outraged ads to one group of people, and thoughtful policy-based ads to another. They can also fine-tune their get-out-the-vote campaigns on Election Day, and more efficiently gerrymander districts between elections. Such use of data will likely have fundamental effects on democracy and voting.
A new research paper looks at the trends:
Abstract: This paper surveys the various voter surveillance practices recently observed in the United States, assesses the extent to which they have been adopted in other democratic countries, and discusses the broad implications for privacy and democracy. Four broad trends are discussed: the move from voter management databases to integrated voter management platforms; the shift from mass-messaging to micro-targeting employing personal data from commercial data brokerage firms; the analysis of social media and the social graph; and the decentralization of data to local campaigns through mobile applications. The de-alignment of the electorate in most Western societies has placed pressures on parties to target voters outside their traditional bases, and to find new, cheaper, and potentially more intrusive, ways to influence their political behavior. This paper builds on previous research to consider the theoretical tensions between concerns for excessive surveillance, and the broad democratic responsibility of parties to mobilize voters and increase political engagement. These issues have been insufficiently studied in the surveillance literature. They are not just confined to the privacy of the individual voter, but relate to broader dynamics in democratic politics.
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Steve • November 23, 2015 12:47 PM
This is nothing new. It’s been going on for decades. Back in the early 1960s political potboiler novelist Eugene Burdick wrote a book called The 480 about a “computer simulation [used] to classify the American electorate.”.
While the book was a work of fiction, the so-called 480 in the title was not. It was an early attempt at slicing and dicing the electorate into socio-economic groups and it is credited, in part, for John F. Kennedy’s victory in 1960.