Campaign 08: The Technology of Getting Out of the Vote (GOTV)

With only one day remaining in the presidential election campaign, as many as a third of eligible voters have already cast their votes through absentee, mail-in and early voting.  There are reports that Senators McCain and Obama will both break with tradition by campaigning on election day.  At issue, voter turnout.

Political organizing is powered by hybrid systems that combine aspects of data integration, customer relationship management and business intelligence for political purposes: canvassing and voter contact on the front lines, and casework, donor, field, membership and volunteer management in the background.

The names of the systems have changed over years and their design, architecture and functions have been imporved but the underlying purpose remains the same.  The RNC's Voter Vault, a web-based tool is now in its third release; and the Voter Activation Network (VAN) replaced Demzilla and is the platform behind the DNC's VoteBuilder, the Obama campaign's volunteer management system, and the organizing tools used by organized labor (AFL-CIO and the SEIU) among others.

It brought to mind a chestnut from the archives about the business intelligence systems used by the two major parties to get out the vote (GOTV):

"Too close to call."  It was David Brinkley's election night epitaph to the 1960 Kennedy-Nixon match up; as it was for Peter Jennings forty years later during the long Florida night that left the Bush-Gore contest in dispute.

With results that were within the margin of error of manual, mechanical and digital vote counts, the television networks reworked their outdated predictive models and Congress - through the Help America Vote Act - set a timetable for the introduction of electronic voting machines, which will be in limited release this year in anticipation of a full roll out in 2006.  Direct Recording Electronic (DRE) voting machines are the new hanging chads of American politics, sparking a debate over disenfranchisement amid concerns about validating that every vote is counted as it was cast. 

If the e-voting debate is over which votes are counted, the full up implementation of CRM in presidential politics raises equally important questions about which votes are cast.  Complex and highly partisan Customer Relationship Management is being deployed by both major parties to help tip election results in their favor, district by district, mobilizing their respective bases and wooing fickle swing voters.

The Democratic National Committee has built Demzilla with demographic, geographic and psychographic data on 158 million Americans; the Republican National Committee has locked up the same kinds of data on 165 million Americans its Voter Vault.  Given the sensitivity of the information that they contain, it belies otherwise sophisticated political apparatuses that both systems have been christened with names that are, at once, sophomoric and Orwellian.  What's more, after limited use in local and state races, Demzilla and Voter Vault go head to head it their first presidential throw down next month.

The number of names is less important than the contextual data that wraps around each name.  "We have a numeric coding system," explained Washington state Republican chairman Chris Vance in a recent interview about the vault, "One is a hard Republican.  Two is a soft Republican.  Three is an independent.  Four is a soft Democrat.  Five is a hard Democrat.  Six is someone who we reached, but refused to answer our questions.  A zero is someone we have never been able to reach, we know nothing about."

The first five categories bring a certain scientific precision to the art of mobilizing the base - but the political prize is in converting zeros to partisans by election night.  And that puts political CRM in the cross hairs of the same groups that have targeted e-voting as a threat to democracy.

At issue are the inferences that can be drawn from the manipulation of previously discrete data elements including all the usual stuff about who we are and how to reach us plus inferences gleaned from our reading habits and organizational affiliations.  Layer on the answers to the questions about whether we vote and make political contributions (derived from secondary use of public records) and our views on war, gun ownership and abortion (which we may volunteer to the earnest, PDA-touting campaign volunteer at our door) and we end up with targeted messages that serve up 'my president, my way,' apparently unaware that they look different to people that have been placed in one of the other buckets.

One academic observer has gone so far as to condemn the parties' segmentation strategies because he claims they are not just correlated to, but the cause of, a precipitous fall in voter participation.  Curiously, the complaint does not appear to extend to the legion of advocacy groups that use the same methods, punctuated by media campaigns and even lines of clothing, to convert non-voters to political participants.

This could all be a hideously bad idea.  Or it could be a defining characteristic of a new civic engagement that solves some old problems while creating new ones.  A century ago, Edward Berneys, alternatively known as the father of American public relations or propaganda, envisioned manipulating public opinion as an "unseen mechanism of society [that] constitutes an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country.  A generation ago, we came to accept a seemingly progressive idea that the "personal is political."  Now, we have systems that automate both.

And if this year's election is again too close to call, the winners will know they are onto something.  And so will the losers.

The original column appeared as "Political CRM: Swing voters and the systems that love them" in Government Technology magazine in October 2004.