Digital technology has become ingrained into our everyday lives. Whichever industry, niche, or activity you take, you’ll see that it doesn’t work without some kind of digital technology. Not anymore.
For the past decade, politicians have been catching up with this painfully obvious trend. They now use different kinds of digital technology during their election campaigns. They use social media to connect to the public, and they collect data for microtargeting just as your local or corporate business does. Moreover, in some countries, the elections themselves have been partially or completely digitized.
In this article, we’ll explore how digital technology is used during election campaigns and on the day of the elections around the world.
Election campaigns in the digital age
In 2020, the spending on technology for the Democratic party in the US presidential election campaign has reached a record high of $3.6 billion. This is how we know political parties care about technology. So what exactly do they use it for?
Communication
Obama’s 2008 election campaign is thought to be a starting point in the transformation of elections towards being digitally savvy. His next campaign in 2012 was even more groundbreaking in this regard. A strategist for the campaign wrote, “The internet and social media have fundamentally changed how campaigns strategize and communicate with their constituents.” Both wins have been largely attributed to how the party used the Internet and social media to connect to the public. Later, the next US president Donald Trump made Twitter a primary platform for communication during his campaign and his presidential term, putting digital means of communication above all else (TV, paper, radio).
Besides social media, specific digital technologies have arrived on the market that help political parties reach their audience. For example, Impactive is a digital platform for communication with supporters and increasing engagement. The platform allows politicians to reach millions of supporters via peer-to-peer texts, broadcast messages, relational organizing, and other features.
Chatbots have also been actively used during election campaigns. In the German elections of 2017, the CSU party launched its chatbot Leo. With its help, voters could ask questions and learn about CSU’s policy platform. The chatbot also attempted to mimic a casual conversation and make fun of the rival parties by sending satirical memes and GIFs.
Some apps help politicians gather supporters and organize them. For example, Trump’s app Phunware, which was used during the 2020 electoral campaign, allowed its users to communicate with each other. This means the users could talk directly to any of the 2.8 million people who downloaded the app. And, if the users gave permission, that included their entire contact list as well. Once installed, the app could track location, send notifications, sell MAGA merchandise, fundraise and log attendance at the president’s rallies.
Voter mobilization
One of the hardest parts of the election campaign is to mobilize voters. This means that parties have to make sure as many people as possible are registered to vote, have the information they need to make educated decisions, and turn in their ballots. Lately, digital technology has been implemented by some parties to help them with voter mobilization. In the 2017 German federal election campaign, country-wide canvassing apps were implemented to assist in door-to-door efforts. For example, with the CDU (Christian Democratic Union of Germany) party’s Connect17 app, a volunteer canvasser could log in and receive data-based information about where to knock on doors. At the same time, the headquarters would receive real-time feedback on the quality of interactions and potential policy concerns. Connect 17 gamified the canvassing process, which increased competitiveness among the party’s volunteers and encouraged them to visit more houses.
Some technologies combine multiple features needed for a successful elections campaign, including voter mobilization. For example, NGP VAN is the political technology company behind SmartVAN. SmartVAN allows campaigns to identify voters, support voter mobilization, and increase communication with the audience. It’s a database with data coming from publicly available files, which is made user-friendly and accessible.
Donations
For many parties, donations are crucial to their existence and to their chances to win the race. Digital technology has made the process much easier. For example, ActBlue is software that candidates of the US Democratic party used in the past to provide an easy and secure way for people to make donations to their campaigns. ActBlue saves the information and enables supporters to donate to multiple campaigns with one click, which many find convenient and encouraging.
In India, the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) developed a payment-gateway system for accepting online donations. Close to 90% of its donations were received through the site. The same party created an Aap Ka Daan (Your Donation) app. The app used Unified Payment Interface (UPI), which allows for transfers to be made from one mobile device to another for donations. Finally, the party used telecom service-provider fund transfer platforms such as Airtel Money and Vodafone MPesa to collect funds.
Polls
Polls used to be a big part of the election process. Polls helped understand and predict how the elections would turn out. However, lately, polls are being taken over by AI. The reason is simple: polls are suffering from the “non-response bias” ― cell-phones users tend not to answer calls from numbers they don’t recognize ― and don’t tend to show correct results anymore. Instead, AI collects data and builds data implementation models based on the past results to show how people will vote in the future. AI models also aren’t perfect. For example, they predicted Clinton’s win in the 2016 US presidential elections. But the more data AI gathers, the better it becomes, meaning AI models have a much more promising future than traditional polls.
Advertising
Whether we like it or not, plain advertising is a vital part of every election campaign. Advertising has transformed since the world has digitized, raising public concerns and actions from various decision-makers, like Twitter banning political advertising and the Digital Service Act requiring Facebook, Google, and similar tech companies to disclose ads bought by political parties, campaigners, and other third-party groups.
However, micro-targeting that has transformed advertising, including political advertising, is not yet outlawed. This means that campaigns continue to collect data using the latest available technology (e.g., digital listening and sentiment analysis) and using algorithms to segment and target voters more specifically and strategically ― for example, based on their age, gender, race, and location.
Other forms of advertising have also emerged. For political parties, it’s often important to make it seem like the majority of voters support them. The goal of advertising, including implicit advertising, in this case, is to model public opinion. In Ukraine, the use of bots is a common digital tactic that politicians use to model public opinion online. A bot “is a human or an algorithm which is deliberately leaving comments intended to influence their readers in a particular way.” During the elections in 2014, the campaign of the future president of Ukraine, Petro Poroshenko, employed the so-called porokhoboty ― bots that would leave positive comments about Poroshenko on social media platforms, blogs, and forums.
Elections in the digital age
One would expect the actual elections to involve as much digitization as campaigning does, but as you probably know from your personal experience, this isn’t the case. The switch to e-voting is slow: the research conducted by IDEA International showed that electronic voting is practiced in 34 out of 178 studied countries. Estonia was the first to introduce e-voting and remains the only European country to allow its citizens to vote electronically in general elections. In contrast, electronic voting systems are becoming increasingly widespread in Latin America, the Middle East, and the Far East.
Unlike e-voting, the use of other technologies for the electoral process is quite widespread. Many countries use technologies for voter registration, such as biometric technology. This is often the case in less developed countries, where citizens lack reliable identity documents and can rig the elections by voting multiple times. In many African countries, biometric technology is used to help identify voters and prevent fraud. For example, in Kenya, Ghana, and Nigeria, a fingerprint is scanned at the polling station. In India, facial photographs are used for the same purpose.
What are the issues of using digital technology for the electoral process?
Data collection and data implementation
In many countries, it’s illegal to collect the personal information of voters without their consent. Yet, digital technology of all kinds tends to find ways around restrictions. The German CDU app Connect17 that was mentioned above, used data from the German postal service while making a point of not collecting voter names and addresses in the app. That information was combined with internal data to predict that a certain geographic area would vote for the app’s party or the rival party. The technology got a backlash from the public, which led to multiple audits from data-privacy agencies across Germany.
AI-powered predictive modeling which has taken over traditional polling is accused of massive data exchanges, which is questionably legal.
Cyber hacker attacks
The introduction of any digital technology in the electoral process provides opportunities for cyber hacker attacks. There have been multiple proven attacks in national elections of various countries. In the 2014 elections in Ukraine, cyber hackers who have been identified as “Russian-linked” infiltrated Ukraine’s central election commission. It is believed they deleted key files and implanted a virus that would have changed the results of the election in favor of a fringe ultra-nationalist party. The attempt wasn’t successful; however, the attempts of hacking didn’t stop at that. There are reports that hackers continued to interfere with Ukrainian elections ahead of the 2019 elections ― Ukraine had to patch its cybersecurity vulnerabilities after every attack.
Similarly, in the US, attempts by the “Russian-linked” hackers to break into electoral computers during the 2016 presidential election have been repeatedly proven and have influenced the attitudes towards further digitization of the electoral process.
Electoral fraud and reliability
Electoral fraud is possible with all kinds of voting, whether it’s paper or electronic. However, with paper ballots, large-scale physical tampering can easily be seen by election observers. In contrast, electronic voting makes it close to impossible to spot tampering. Everything happens inside the machines that are controlled by the very people who are usually accused of tampering. For example, in 2021, Russia carried out electronic elections for the State Duma, which is one of the chambers of the Russian parliament. The results were presented much later than promised and contradicted the initial numbers, which led to research that showed that the results must have been falsified.
Even in cases when electoral fraud hasn’t necessarily happened, the reliability of electronic voting is debatable. For example, in Kenya’s August 2017 poll, the voting software malfunctioned in many parts of the country. As in the Russian elections, the results were delayed, which raised nationwide suspicions and the results were annulled.
Final words
Digital technology is already used in many parts of the electoral cycle. In the future, the use of digital technology might become even more overwhelming, as its benefits are clear at every step of the process. Internet voting, which seems to be the last step that most countries haven’t taken yet, is also obviously attractive. Many people don’t have time to go to the polling stations, and many don’t want to make an effort. This means that in every country a significant percentage of citizens don’t vote at all. Internet voting would solve this problem.
However, at the moment, the public and the governments have to be mindful of the technology they are using. Unlawful use of data, lack of cybersecurity, and electoral fraud are very real risks that people face. In events as important as elections, this can influence the lives of millions.
