Political Parties Turn to Tech Startups to Hit the Right Note with Voters

BENGALURU: The Janata Dal (Secular) has identified 80 of the 224 constituencies as priority seats that it has a chance to either win or make a dent in the Assembly elections next month.

It has begun targeting voters with the help of Voter intelligence software provided by a Pune-based startup will help them crack the code. The party looks to tap every voter - around 1,000 people who are listed in each of the 300 polling stations; reaching out to them through automated phone calls, text messages and through WhatsApp messages.

"Local volunteers go door-to-door and get people to download a mobile application that has questions regarding their favourite political party and voting preferences. Data entered will automatically reach our centralised servers," said Naveen C, head of JD(S) IT cell, declining to reveal the name of the startup. In Bengaluru, volunteers have gone door-to-door in six out of seven priority constituencies, including Dasarahalli, Yeshwanthpur, Mahalakshmi Layout, Hebbal and Byatarayanapura. The startup has also provided the party with a phone number database of 4.23 crore voters in Karnataka, Naveen said.

With social media emerging as a key ally to help political parties get closer to their voters, a few startups are providing technology to monitor poll-related data trends, analyse demographics, gauge public sentiments and micro-target voter preferences. Tools include social media opinions and on-ground polls tracked through predictive data analysis. "Availability of deep-dive data analytics and tech tools has made a world of difference to the way election strategies are built. Mapping voter behaviour is crucial for any political activity now," said Praveen Patil, founder of electoral analysis platform 5Forty3.

"We are monitoring Karnataka real-time by deploying a specialised tool called MAPi (Micro Analytical Projections Intelligence) that divides the State into 53600 GUI (Geographic Units of Intelligence), with each GUI being home to about 1200 citizens. Our ground teams feed data to MAPi daily and we use predictive data analysis to track voter behaviour. At present, MAPi has over 1.5 million datasets in Karnataka," said Patil, declining to name political clients using this service.

MyVoteToday, which tracks poll patterns through social media, says that its findings are monitored by major political parties, including Congress and BJP. "Purely by tracking people's social media behaviour, we tell politicians what exactly to say in which rally, pain points and advantages in constituencies and which candidate to field," says co-founder Amit Bagaria. The platform conducts at least 30 surveys a month, each getting over 35,000 votes.

Srivatsa YB, president of the Congress social media wing in Karnataka, said that the party depends on in-house data crunching and demographic analysis. "Third-party services might not provide authentic, neutral data if they are also backed by other political parties," he said. A source associated with BJP's social media operations said that the party depends heavily on targeted WhatsApp messages.

All this, however, raises an important question of where parties and startups are getting their database from. Especially with questions on data privacy raised in the backdrop of the Cambridge Analytica scandal. The British analytics firm has been accused of illegally harvesting raw data from 85 million Facebook users and influencing voters in several countries including President Donald Trump's election campaign in the US.

According to MyVoteToday's Bagaria, there are startups that provide phone numbers or email ids either by mining through in-house coders or sourcing them from data brokers. These brokers could be anyone - mobile service providers or their former employees, loan agents or even local RTOs. "Political parties are only concerned about reaching their voters and not how startups get the numbers in the first place," he said.

The source from BJP, added, "Congress is said to be one of Cambridge Analytica's clients. Similarly, for the BJP to buy phone numbers from data brokers to send targeted Whatsapp messages is not difficult."

Given the lack of government regulation surrounding privacy, data brokers or startups are within legal framework to sell data to political parties without people's permission, said Sunil Abraham, executive director, The Centre for Internet and Society. "The IT Act's consent and disclosure limitations apply only to sensitive personal information like passwords, biometrics, banking information, sexual orientation or mental health. So data can be obtained indirectly without people's permission. Social media data, on the other hand, is as good as getting information from public domain."