Election '05: High-tech campaigning targets key voters

Traditional election campaigning methods have found themselves on the sidelines this time around as the mainstream political parties adopt a high-tech approach to the 2005 general election. Various database and analytical technologies are being used to help target almost one million voters in key marginal seats who will ultimately decide the result on 5 May.

Set against a backdrop of voter apathy in the UK, the margin of victory or defeat in vital swing constituencies is extremely narrow - and turnout is expected to be low - so the battle for votes is fierce.

In a move away from internally developed databases, the Conservative Party has spent a reported £250,000 on technology used by the Republican Party during the US presidential election last year.

One of the strategies adopted by George Bush's campaign team was to target people in key US states who didn't vote but had Republican sympathies and therefore needed to be persuaded to get out and vote if Bush was to be re-elected. This strategy was realised with the help of a database called Voter Vault.

Instead of randomly sending party volunteers and activists onto the streets to drum up Republican support, the Voter Vault database used masses of publicly available data and marketing information to draw up lists of individuals identified as probable Republican sympathisers.

Following a Republican-hosted trip to the US to see Voter Vault in action, Michael Howard and the Conservative Party decided to buy the technology to support their battle to oust Tony Blair and the Labour Party at this general election.

Conservative Central Office is able to use Voter Vault to supply its candidates with lists of potential Tory voters who could swing a marginal seat in their favour.

The Tories have filled Voter Vault with data from credit reference agency Experian's Mosaic database, which uses consumer classification techniques to categorise the UK's 23 million households. This has been supplemented with local party information to further identify people who could be targeted by canvassers to vote Tory.

Conservative party co-chairman, Dr Liam Fox, has previously said that Voter Vault will "out-gun" Labour and the Liberal Democrats on the ground in the Tories' 168 target seats, and claims testing showed it to be 82 per cent accurate in identifying target voters.

But the usefulness of Voter Vault in the UK has been dismissed by the Liberal Democrats who are using the same homegrown database that was developed in the 1980s.

Mark Pack, Lib Dem online campaign manager, told silicon.com that the usefulness of Voter Vault is limited because the range of data available to political parties in the US is much greater than in the UK, owing to data protection laws.

"In Britain there is a lot less information available and data protection rules mean you can't use it unless it is used for what it was gathered. A lot of what you can do with Voter Vault in the US is not legal in Britain," he said.

The Liberal Democrats will use a Microsoft Windows-based distributed database called EARS that runs on PCs.

"It underpins our local campaigning so when we carry out local grass-roots activities it stores appropriate data. We rely more on the data we collect ourselves. It also has the advantage that people are voluntarily giving us this information," said Pack.

The Liberal Democrats' website - which was relaunched just before the start of the election campaign - includes party political broadcasts with subtitles for hard of hearing or deaf people.

In fact the Lib Dems have been one of the most innovative users of technology during the campaign, although opinion polls suggest that technology use will not itself have much impact on the election's outcome. Along with the likes of SMS news service alerts and a 'battle bus' blog, the party entered the world of podcasting this week when it made leader Charles Kennedy's campaign speech available for download to iPod users.

Tony Blair and the Labour Party are known for using the Excalibur database during the 1997 election campaign as an instant rebuttal tool to shoot down rival candidates' claims on TV and radio.

Labour has been less outspoken about the methods employed this time, but it is clear the party is trying to use various technologies to engage directly with voters and bypass a largely hostile media.

Its national call centre in Newcastle is responsible for millions of canvassing calls and for sending out mailshots, while a database of email addresses has been used to send messages from Blair about campaign issues. The fact that many non-Labour voters, and even opposition party members, received emails headed "Dear Labour supporter" raised allegations of spamming, which the party denied - saying it had not broken any laws.

Labour has also hired US Democrat Party online activist Zack Exley - who famously snapped up a George Bush website address and used it to host an anti-Bush site - to help out during the campaign but the party has remained tight-lipped about his exact role.

Both the Labour Party and the Conservative Party failed to respond to repeated requests for co-operation and comment with this article.

It is claimed that the respective parties' use of technology in the US presidential elections made a difference to the result, helping Bush win his battle for re-election. We'll only know after 5 May whether something similar will happen in the UK, but it is clear that by borrowing the high-tech methods used by big business the nature of electioneering is undergoing fundamental changes.