By Peter Ewart

It’s election time and you are talking with your next door neighbour. You notice that the campaign literature he receives in the mail from the same political party is different from what you get. Or, later, you click on the party website and up pops different information than what comes up on your son or daughter’s computer when they click on the same website. Or someone you know from across town tells you that she is deluged with brochures and ads from the party, while you receive nothing.

What is going on here? You are likely being microtargeted by a political party. As discussed in previous articles in this series (see Part 1, Part 2 & Part 3), a growing trend in some political parties in the U.S. and Canada is to take the information they have traditionally gathered on individual voters and combine it with Big Data purchased from commercial data brokers, including data on credit card purchases, real estate and car ownership, divorce records, magazine subscriptions, and so on, as well as website browsing history and Facebook interaction.

Using all of this information, a political party can “adapt its messaging to appeal to an individual practically down to his or her fingerprint” (1).

These voters are then put into groups with particular factors related to ethnicity, values, views on gay marriage, gun control, taxation, income levels, and so on. These groups are then given a variety of labels such as “tax and terrorism moderates”, “older suburban newshounds”, and “weak leaners” (i.e. people who can be convinced to change their vote).

Advertising and other campaign efforts are then customized for each group, and the individuals in each are bombarded with personalized messages so as to achieve results in terms of party recruitment, fundraising, and persuasion.

Thus, you, your neighbour, your son and daughter, or your friend from another ethnic background, may all receive differing messages from the same political party, according to the Big Data gathered and the individual profiles and “predictive analytics” developed on each of you. Or, if you live in an area of town or belong to a category of voters that has been “red-lined”, the party simply may choose to ignore you completely.

The effectiveness of microtargeting can be especially felt in closely contested election races where only a few votes separate the winning and losing candidates and division on party lines is relatively set or stable. Thus, you have the phenomenon where a party may only concentrate on a particular group of voters in the riding who have certain issues or “values” or are of a certain demographic or ethnic profile. There may be only 500 or 1000 of these “key” voters, but the entire resources of the party campaign are microtargeted at winning them over, while the rest of the electorate in the riding is virtually ignored.

In Canada, the federal Conservative Party has been particularly effective using microtargeting. Indeed, Senator Irving Gerstein boasted to the Conservative Party Convention in 2011 that 40 Conservative Party MPs would not have been elected without using microtargeting and other Big Data techniques on small sections of the electorate. For example, in the 2008 election, the Harper Conservatives focused on fewer than 500,000 voters out of 23 million voters in Canada. But that was enough to put them over the top and get a majority government with 39% of the popular vote (about 1 in 4 of eligible voters).

Governing parties like the Conservatives can back up their microtargeting with what are called “boutique tax cuts”, i.e. “narrowly focused non-refundable tax credits aimed at the middle class in hopes of currying political favour for the Conservatives come election time” (2).

In the last few years, an entire industry has sprouted up that specializes in gathering Big Data on voters and then sells it off to political parties, especially ones with deep pockets. In that respect, one of the things industry experts emphasize is that “microtargeting begins and ends with good data” (2). And so it is that the big political parties in the U.S. (and more and more in Canada) are engaged in a virtual arms race to vacuum up all the personal data they can on individual voters. And, of course, this “good data” includes information on whether or not a voter has cast a ballot in an election.

The cheerleaders of the Big Data industry gush about its possibilities, claiming that it has become “a key part” of the election strategies of parties from “the highest levels of a campaign down to the grassroots” (2).

But there is a huge downside to all of this emphasis on microtargeting, Big Data collection, and predictive analytics that all citizens should be aware of in terms of their rights, privacy and the democratic process itself. This includes MLAs in the BC Legislature (Liberals, NDP and Greens), who are debating whether to pass legislation granting parties access, after an election, to voter participation records.

First of all, there is the obvious problem with Big Data and the privacy rights of citizens. Currently, in Canada, political parties have little or no legislation governing what private information they can collect on voters. Why should they be privileged to hold such sensitive information without regulation? Already, in the U.S., there have been a number of notorious cases where reams of personal information has been hacked or stolen from unsecured political party databases(4).

Second, while these Big Data election campaigns are targeting individual voters with customized messages appealing to their specific “issues, fears, wants and desires,” the reality is that “there is no way that any candidate or party can deliver on such precise expectations once the election is over” (1). The result is that cynicism and voter apathy is further fostered, and more people simply opt out of electoral participation.

Third, the personalization of political messaging could lead to a future where “confirmation bias” is everywhere. Specifically, “a world where our beliefs and perceptions are constantly confirmed” and never challenged, thus leading to “polarization and the failure of democratic dialogue” (5).

Fourth, microtargeting and other manipulative Big Data techniques erode any sense of community among the citizenry.   An essential element of democracy is a public space “where citizens can meet and exchange diverse opinions – it is within this common space that a robust democratic dialogue takes place, and a commonality emerges through the differences” (5). On the other hand, microtargeting “devalues the social fabric; there’s no collective messaging” (6).

Thus the concept of a common good and a collective interest is destroyed. This concept has been of special importance historically in bringing about such programs as Medicare, public schools, universal suffrage, environmental protection, worker compensation, civil rights, and so on. Is this concept, which is the foundation of civil society, to be thrown away in the service of backroom political operatives and Big Data experts whose only aim is to get their party elected?

If the purpose of an election is to “render a clear and coherent expression of the political will [of the population] so as to turn the political will into the legal will” backed up by the consent of the citizenry (7), how can this be accomplished through such anti-democratic and divisive measures as microtargeting? There is a huge contradiction here.

In Canada, we have parliamentary governance that is characterized by an extreme party system, one that marginalizes, divides and pigeon-holes the electorate. Microtargeting, the ultimate technique of divisiveness, is perhaps its logical conclusion.

At a time when there is an unprecedented growth in the power of global monopolies and corporate oligarchs, we should reflect on just who this division and atomization of the citizenry serves.

Members of all parties, as well as citizens at large, should think about this as the current debate in the BC Legislature over access to voter records goes on, and as a federal election looms.

Instead, rather than going down the path of Big Data and microtargeting, we should consider developing new mechanisms and techniques that can advance our collective interests, as well as reform and renew our party-dominated political process so that we, as citizens, have more say and more control over it.

This is the final column in this series.

Peter Ewart is a columnist and writer based in Prince George, British Columbia. He can be reached at: peter.ewart@shaw.ca

(1) Ridder, Rick. “All politics is customizable: The pitfalls of micro-targeting.” Real Clear Politics. December 8, 2014.

(2) Taylor, Peter Shawn & Ben Sand. “Shutting down Stephen Harper’s tax boutique.” Globe and Mail. Aug. 23, 2012.

(3) Kriess, Daniel. “Yes we can (profile you): A brief primer on campaigns and political data.” Stanford Law Review. February 2, 2012.

(4) Abse, Nathan. “IAB presents innovations in web marketing and advertising: Big data and microtargeted political advertising in Election 2012.” IAB. February 2013.

(5) McArdle, Jennifer. “Why Internet personalization could erode democracy.” CReST Blog. Potomac Institute for Policy Studies. May 8, 2014.

(6) Coffin, Mark. “Democracy without dialogue (part 4): Micro-targetting and the elusive Tim Horton’s voter.” February 19, 2015.

(6) Di Carlo, Anna. “Harper Conservatives’ micro-targeting and wrecking of the electoral process.” The Marxist-Leninist. July 16, 2011.