US Election: Voter suppression

Ahead of the 2020 US Election, Channel 4 released evidence of infamous data science company Cambridge Analytica helping the Trump campaign target 3.5m Black Americans with a “deterrence” campaign designed to suppress voting.

The start of the televised debates signals the home leg of the campaign, a frantic few weeks in which not only will the vast majority of votes be spent but also the vast majority of campaign money, particularly online. This was the case in 2016 in both the US election and the UK’s European referendum with the bulk of digital ad spend being placed within a key decision window in the days before votes were cast.

The evidence released by Channel 4 showing that voter suppression campaigns were run during this window during the 2016 election should come as no surprise to those who closely follow US politics, or those who have read these pages before.

In 2017 a Signify analysis of the Virginia Gubernatorial race highlighted the issue of voter suppression of demographics that traditionally skewed towards one party.

Our insight was based on a ShareScore analysis of the top political stories in Virginia over the past three years, highlighting a massive issue which was well known to local politicians, but completely off the news agenda. One of the great benefits of machine-driven analysis is the removal of inherent bias and the ability to look at long-term issues rather than whatever is trending or in the news. Our insight focussed on a dormant issue that had been current a year before – but was still affecting almost a million people in Virginia.

That issue was – driving license suspension. One in six Virginians have had their driving license retained over a court fine – and this overwhelmingly affects less well-off demographics. With no license, voters lack the means to travel and the required photo ID to vote. This state of affairs had been addressed by the previous Governor back in 2016, but the fix had not had time to take effect and there were still hundreds of thousands of citizens unable to vote. We could see them talking about the issue still.

Actors like Cambridge Analytica would clearly be able to leverage offline scenarios like this when deploying deterrence campaigns to ensure that voters from those key demographics abandoned attempts to vote.

You can read the full post from 2017 here: https://www.signify.ai/blog-feed/vagov2017