In our corner of the world I’ve worked with a great bunch of people to successfully pass several school levies. Our crowning achievement was successfully passing a bond for a new high school.
Working on these campaigns opened my eyes on how important it was to motivate your Yes voters to actually cast their ballots. In our state its fairly easy to vote. Ballots are mailed to you about two weeks before the due date and they just need to be postmarked by election day to be valid. Even with that ease ballot returns are still dismally low.
This worked to our advantage, however, once we had identified our Yes voters. We repeatedly called them to the point of annoyance, encouraging them to get their ballots back. It worked. We won with close to a 70% Yes vote. To save our resources we only targeted voters that had voted 3-4 times in the 4 elections ignoring those who only vote 50% of the time. Even if identified as a confirmed Yes vote we couldn’t count on them getting their ballot returned. We used data bought from the county to try to track if they had returned their ballot.
Access to the full voter rolls gave the Russians key pieces of data. They could see who the motivated voters might be. That data, of course, doesn’t tell how someone voted but it could be used with a data source that does.
We already know that they were able to use Facebook and other social media to identify and target certain groups of people.
So if Russian intelligence used the processing power of their computers to feed in all of this data they could target a voter they could motivate to get to the polls and vote.
Now all political campaigns do this to some extent. We tried in our own amateurish way and we had limited success. Every time I hear someone say, “It’s ok, they didn’t access the actual vote counts!” I cringe. That’s missing the bigger picture.
Russian interference was on many levels, using many different methods. In a battle you don’t just shoot one type of weapon at your opponent. You throw your whole arsenal at them.
Trump was criticized for not have a “Ground Game” in key states. He actually did… it was just virtual.
