They're based on calling phone numbers, which are tied to identities, and the President has access to the NSA databases that correlate everyone's identities with their phones, IP addresses, etc.
If people in Congress or the President wanted to, they could absolutely find out who answered in polls that they'd vote for a candidate.
for instance, one can use one's own app:
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-election-trump/with-r...
“The most important, golden thing in politics is a cellphone number,” said Parscale, who ran Trump’s digital efforts in 2016 before leading the 2020 campaign. “When we receive cellphone numbers, it really allows us to identify them across the databases. Who are they, voting history, everything.”
My guess is it uses geolocation APIs to match city to politicians in your district. Maybe even looks up politicians phone numbers by area codes that belong to those cities. This is just a theory of course.
Yes. One of my first jobs out of school I worked with a Standford professor Doug Rivers (@pollingpoint) that had millions of users voting records he obtained from the government for 'research' purposes. That data: your name, address, what party you are in, et al. is TOTALLY public and passed around legally to other research centers and government agencies. He had me match address information with other databases.
Who is in the lead. What Regions/Districts are what majority. I mean if you can theoretically get real time data on voting machines. There is a lot you can do with that information. Everything from 'what days of the week will democrats vote' to 'predicting who will win the election'. If names are stored with a timestamp, they could potentially know exactly who you vote for and the time you do it. I think that part is far fetched. But it is an idea. All the information could be used for skewing future elections. For that parties favor.
There are services which correlate emails, phones, facebook with voter records. I know they're used for campaigning. I'll ask around to see if any electeds use them.
We can scan your social networks for registered voters you know. Once you know who they are, you can affect their vote by asking them to turn out for who you want. I think the discovery piece is very interesting, even if you're not ready to ask anyone to help you elect a candidate yet. We'll be building more uses in the future.
Voter registration information is public, also both parties have huge, manually curated lists that they sell access to. But giving FB a seed audience of 10000 voters and asking them to find the 100mil most similar people works better a lot of the time. The effectiveness of FB's machine learning on this stuff would blow your mind.
I built a service on top of EC2/Asterisk that did political phone polling. Not really polling though as much as voter ID, we'd push out 100,000 calls into a congressional district and campaigns would use the resulting data for targeted mail and GOTV. It was all point and click-- write your poll and record it with a flash plugin-- stupidly simple. After the 2008 election I shut it down, largely due to getting to work with so many politicians and realizing how totally worthless human beings most of them are. Seriously, how the fuck these people are writing laws is beyond me.
And yeah, the laws are total bullshit. If I revive the project my plan is to have a massive list of phone numbers as well as a list of congressman's offices, personal cell phones, children's cell phone numbers, mistresses, etc. Whenever an important vote comes up you call your people and give them a very short briefing on the issue and then connect the call through to the appropriate number. Because you can control the call throttling you can lock up phone lines and it would be about 100x more effective than traditional calling campaigns. Ron Paul 2012.
"We take that data and match it up with lists of voters, and combine that data science to come up with ideas about you who might want to sell a product to, or in the case of politics, this is this person's’ propensity to vote."
If you're able to determine some subset of voters from the attached timestamp information, then you're equally able to use that data to harass people who didn't vote for the candidate you want.
Totally get that. Candidates and parties have much more data. They link people to all sorts of datasets. DMV, public employee rosters, union membership, etc.
If a good political operation needs to engage with a bunch of gay teachers with household incomes >$100k who drive trucks and own a home, they can ID those people.
We have to decide if people should have powers like this.
"Build tools that measure the rate and spread of stories and rumors, and model how it works and who has the biggest impact. Tools can tell us about the origin of stories and the impact of any venue, person or theme.
Connect polling into this in some way.
Find a way to do polling online and not on phones.
Analytics and data science and modeling, polling and resource optimization tools. For each voter, a score is computed ranking probability of the right vote.
Analytics can model demographics, social factors and many other attributes of the needed voters. Modeling will tell us what who we need to turn out and why, and studies of effectiveness will let us know what approaches work well. Machine intelligence across the data should identify the most important factors for turnout, and preference.
It should be possible to link the voter records in Van with upcoming databases from companies like Comcast and others for media measurement purposes.
The analytics tools can be built in house or partnered with a set of vendors."
I've been idly thinking about making a website that does precisely this. It would take a wide variety of expertise and a LOT of manpower to pull off, though. It would be great to tie this to politicians' voting records as well.
Interesting. I imagine foreign governments will have information about people who potentially vote, and their preferences and make a profile of whether they vote democrat or republican.
If people in Congress or the President wanted to, they could absolutely find out who answered in polls that they'd vote for a candidate.
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