Next week the UK goes to the polls. With no clear winner in sight, political parties are delving into online data to identify voters who could make a difference

Why not put clipboards in the cloud? (Image: Peter MacDiarmid/Getty)

WITH just one week to go until the most unpredictable UK general election in a generation, you’d think that every vote counts.

Not so. If you have already decided who to vote for, know when you’ll be going to the polling station, and plan to stay up all night to watch the results come in, the politicians don’t care about you.

The two biggest parties, Labour and the Conservatives, are fighting a surge in support for what had been minor parties. The only predictable outcome is a hung parliament, in which no party has an overall majority. That means it’s the undecided, unmotivated and uninterested voters who will decide this election, if they can only be coaxed to the polling booths. Increasingly, parties are turning to data mining to get them on board.


“It’s the undecided and unmotivated who will decide the election, if they can be coaxed to the polls”

The 2012 US presidential election, which Barack Obama won in part due to the Democrats’ ability to target certain voters, showed the power of having a solid data team as part of the campaign.

“There is a lot of opportunity to be increasingly clever,” says Andrew Whitehurst of Wess, a London-based firm that runs digital campaigns for all three major UK parties. His colleague watched both sides in the last US presidential campaign drumming up support on the same street. “The Romney camp knocked on every single door, and the Obama camp knocked on about seven.”

With memberships at an all-time low, the UK parties don’t have the ground troops to waste on the Republicans’ mistake. Instead they need to use data to identify people who are most likely to support them, and to make the effort to cast their ballot.

The process starts with the electoral roll, which lists the name and address of everyone in the country who is registered to vote. Parties blend in any information they have gathered about you from canvassing, along with consumer data and even social media profiles. “It’s not just official data,” says Whitehurst. “People are increasingly giving over more and more information about themselves.”

In the US, the Democrats used this data to build a model that gives each person a score based on their support for a particular party and how likely they are to vote. These predictions can be plotted (see graph) such that the people at the edges aren’t worth spending resources on: either they have already decided who to vote for, or they are entirely disengaged.

“In the middle are people who might vote and you know support you, or at least you think would support you if they had the right information,” says Tiffany Washburn, a former data analyst for the Obama campaign and now at Google.

Replicating this in the UK is harder, as campaign spending restrictions and data protection laws limit what parties can do. What’s more, the multiparty nature of UK politics makes such modelling a headache. In the US, an environmentalist who supports gay marriage is almost certain to be a Democrat, but in the UK, ticking these two boxes doesn’t pin down someone’s party.

Instead, the parties must leverage information gleaned on the doorstep or through phone canvassing to make more generalised predictions, says Whitehurst. “They will try to develop profiles to say: we know you and we know loads of other people who fit into the same buckets. Can we then discern where other potential voters might be, who also fit this profile and who we haven’t doorstepped?”

Having identified these people, the parties can decide how best to reach them, whether by knocking on doors, leafleting or emailing.

The latest addition to the arsenal is Facebook advertising that exploits information you’ve added to your profile. “Facebook allows quite a rich range of targeting options,” says Mark Pack, who previously ran online campaigns for the third major UK party, the Liberal Democrats. “That’s the big difference now from five years ago.”

Gathering that all-important canvassing data is also a challenge in the UK, where the humble clipboard still reigns supreme, hampering the ability to access and record voter preferences in detail. “People should be able to knock on doors holding an iPad and have the voter information right in front of them,” says Anthony Ridge-Newman, who explored the Conservative party’s use of technology in a book entitled Cameron’s Conservatives and the Internet. “As soon as they input that data, it should be sent up and logged centrally.”

Some parties allow activists to access voter data by smartphone or tablet, but this has not yet taken off, says Whitehurst. The Conservatives’ Votesource system, for example, is so new that users are still on the learning curve.

Partly because parties can’t always roll out cutting-edge techniques, a few candidates are going it alone with decentralised systems. One is an app called Kanto, which helps canvassers log voter’s interests to the cloud. On polling day, users can also tick off people they know to have voted, ensuring no campaign resources are wasted.

Having accurate records makes campaigning three times more efficient, says Thomas Borwick, founder of Kanto Systems. “In a perfect system you have the right person knock on the right door, who has something in common with the voter, can engage them in a conversation and make sure they go to the polling station.”

Other ad-hoc methods, says Whitehurst, include using constituents’ emails to target people on particular issues, studying Transport for London data to figure out the busiest times to canvas commuters, or even trying to sweet-talk people using dating apps like Tinder.

“Transport for London data shows when to canvas commuters. Or try sweet-talking people on Tinder”

The election’s outcome could result in even more data mining. The Conservatives have promised a referendum on whether the UK should stay in the European Union – a nationwide, binary choice much closer to a presidential election, which should make US techniques easier to import.

“Winning elections nowadays is not really about convincing people, it’s about mobilising people,” says Whitehurst.

Look who’s trending on twitter Last week Ed Miliband, leader of the UK Labour Party, saw teenage girls on Twitter come out to support him under the #milifandom hashtag. But do tweets and Facebook posts really translate into votes? Twitter gives instant insights into the latest campaign events, but it has less of an impact on voters. After all, most people don’t follow their local member of parliament on Twitter, and even the prime minister, David Cameron, has under a million followers. “It’s where journalists pick up stories, where party activists can lobby journalists as well,” says Liberal Democrat activist Mark Pack. For coordinating party volunteers, Facebook’s tools to create groups and events are useful, says Conservative activist Anthony Ridge-Newman. “You can see who is going. If a friend is going, it might encourage you to go out and campaign.” Parties can also monitor social media to find new volunteers, says Toni Cowan-Brown of online campaigning platform NationBuilder, which parties in both the US and UK use to identify their influential Twitter followers. “You don’t win an election because you retweeted someone. You win because you continuously engage with people and get them involved,” she says.

This article appeared in print under the headline “Mining for every vote”