Tag: 2020 Election

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Democrats are using a data scientist’s secret sauce to flip Texas blue

For a political campaign, it’s not enough to pull together an army of bright-eyed, venti-caffeinated canvassers—you’ve got to tell them which doors to knock on. In Texas, the Democratic party is spearheading a data experiment that, if it works, could turn an emerging battleground state’s electoral outlook indigo by doing just that.

In other states, parties rely on imperfect national datasets to determine who might become a Democratic voter, a critical function that optimizes the valuable time volunteers and coordinators spend convincing would-be voters to show up to the polls. But for a state like Texas, the normal models don’t work very well—and in true Texas fashion, the Lone Star State is going its own way.  

Texas Democratic Party Targeting Director Hudson Cavanaugh told TechCrunch that his small team of strategists will leverage a new home-brewed machine learning model to mobilize the new voters the party views as mission critical. 

“We’re working on registering literally millions of voters across the state,” Cavanaugh said. 

Lauren Pully, the state party’s data and analytics director, began bringing together resources for a better way of targeting voters in 2018. Cavanaugh was brought into the mix fresh out of a New York startup early last fall to build it out and by primary season, the pair had their own proprietary model ready to go. 

Known as the “Texas model,” the data science project blends insights on the state’s unique voter makeup with a machine learning algorithm that can learn as it goes. The model helps coordinators determine a given person’s likely partisanship, a critical piece of knowledge for allocating campaign resources.

Powered by open source Python packages developed at Google and other machine learning hubs, the project eschews the normal path for state parties, which generally hire expensive outside data firms that come up with cookie cutter models trained on national datasets. 

“It’s kind of a data scientist’s dream,” Cavanaugh told TechCrunch. “We build models and they’re immediately tested in fields all across the state.”

According to Cavanaugh, normal partisanship models aren’t flexible and can’t be retrained to keep up with changes to state voter files and new data collected by campaign workers. Instead, “We’re using Texas to predict Texas,” Cavanaugh told TechCrunch. “And we’re already outperforming any of the national models.”

From a voter registration standpoint, a few things make Texas unique (likely more if you ask a Texan). For one, the state holds an open primary, meaning that Texas voters can cast a vote in either party’s primary, but not both. That fact, coupled with a massive influx of people moving into the state presents a logistical challenge for the Texas Democratic Party as it tracks potential voters.

Now in action, the Texas model has already flagged 600,000 additional potential Democratic voters, people the traditional off-the-shelf model missed. Party representatives believe that somewhere between two-thirds and three-quarters of the 600,000 are likely Democrats, many of them new Texas residents, young voters and people of color. The new model fits hand-in-glove with the Texas Democrats’ newly announced initiative to register 2.6 million new voters.

“We think it’s going to be the X-factor turning Texas blue,” Abhi Rahman, communications director for the Texas Democrats, told TechCrunch. 

According to Hudson, the state’s campaign stakeholders are also board, proud to have a uniquely Texan secret weapon in the quest for a blue Texas. Hudson they’ve shown “tremendous” level of engagement with the tool.

In Texas, the Republican electoral base, which skews older and whiter, has not blossomed along with the state’s population numbers. For Democrats, that presents a uniquely Texas-sized opportunity—and one not far out of reach. In 2018, Texas Senator Ted Cruz narrowly survived a Democratic challenge from Beto O’Rourke, hanging on by a remarkable 215,000 votes. 

Once blood red, the state’s shifting demographics make Texas a glittering prize for Democrats eager to see their state run blue. For a scrappy machine learning experiment seeking to shift the Lone Star state’s political fortunes, the proof will be in the pudding later in 2020.

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Facebook flags Biden video from Trump’s social media director as ‘partly false’

The disinformation wars are heating up as the U.S. barrels toward the 2020 presidential election, leaving tech companies again uncomfortable in the role of referee.

On Monday, Facebook href="https://techcrunch.com/2020/03/08/twitter-applies-its-new-manipulated-media-label-to-video-retweeted-by-trump/"> joined Twitter in flagging a video shared by White House Direction of Social Media Dan Scavino, marking it as “partly false” and limiting its ability to spread on the platform. In the video, presidential candidate and former Vice President Joe Biden warns about the potential of reelecting Trump, but the viral clip is edited down to a portion that misleadingly makes it sound as though Biden is endorsing Trump.

“Fact-checkers rated this video as partly false, so we are reducing its distribution and showing warning labels with more context for people who see it, try to share it, or already have,” a Facebook spokesperson told TechCrunch. “As we announced last year, the same applies if a politician shares the video, if it was otherwise fact checked when shared by others on Facebook.”

Over the weekend, President Trump retweeted the video to his 73.5 million Twitter followers, stating “I agree with Joe!”

On Twitter, Scavino insisted “The video was NOT manipulated,” agreeing with a tweet that argued all clips on Facebook would meet the same criteria.

Flagging the video sets an interesting precedent, particularly given that last month both platforms declined to act on a deceptively edited video depicting Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi ripping up President Trump’s state of the union address. While Pelosi did in fact rip up the address, the video misrepresented the order of events, misleadingly showing Pelosi shredding the speech as Trump honored members of the military.

At the time, Facebook Policy Communications lead Andy Stone aggressively defended Facebook’s decision to let the video spread in a testy exchange with Pelosi Deputy Chief of Staff Drew Hammill, who argued that every day Facebook declined to remove the video “is another reminder that they care more about their shareholders’ interests than the public’s interests.” Stone’s response at the time was combative.

TechCrunch has reached out to both platforms to clarify how the Biden video violates their policies while the Pelosi video did not.

As Biden’s campaign ramps after a much-needed shot in the arm from Super Tuesday, the internet is rife with videos of the former Vice President’s many gaffes. While critics leverage Biden’s stumbles as evidence that he is unfit for the presidency, an interview earlier this year revealed that at least some of his occasionally faltering speech is likely a result of a lifelong stutter, a disorder characterized by disruptions to the flow of speech.

In a statement prior to Facebook’s decision to label the video on Monday, Biden Campaign Manager Greg Schultz slammed Facebook’s “malfeasance” around disinformation. “Facebook won’t say it, but it is apparent to all who have examined their conduct and policies: they care first and foremost about money and, to that end, are willing to serve as one of the world’s most effective mediums for the spread of vile lies.”

Twitter applies its new ‘manipulated media’ label to video retweeted by Trump

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Elizabeth Warren, big tech’s sworn foe, drops out of 2020 race

After a campaign characterized by early stratospheric highs and devastating recent lows, Massachusetts senator Elizabeth Warren has dropped out of the 2020 Democratic race.

Warren vaulted to the top of the contest in mid-2019, attracting attention and support by rolling out early, thoughtful plans for a myriad of campaign issues. That included tackling the recent hot button conversation around regulating big technology companies head on. The position was so central to her platform that Warren released an entire Medium post laying our her position and supporting arguments all the way back in May 2019.

“Today’s big tech companies have too much power — too much power over our economy, our society, and our democracy,” Warren wrote at the time. “They’ve bulldozed competition, used our private information for profit, and tilted the playing field against everyone else. And in the process, they have hurt small businesses and stifled innovation.”

Biden stages a Super Tuesday comeback as Sanders fights for the rest in the West

Warren favored unwinding tech’s biggest acquisitions, including separating Amazon from Whole Foods, Facebook from WhatsApp and Instagram, and Google from Waze and Nest. Unlike her close ally turned 2020 rival Vermont senator Bernie Sanders, Warren didn’t denounce capitalism altogether, instead pushing for a vision of a more regulated industry in which “healthy competition” among tech companies could flourish.

Warren’s campaign raised early red flags for tech’s giants, which are now recalibrating for the threat from Sanders.

Through the 2020 race, the elite upper echelons of tech — executives, venture capitalists and the like — sought a moderate alternative to the economic upheaval they feared would be bad for business, even as their own workers aligned with the contest’s most progressive candidates.

Silicon Valley saw itself in Pete Buttigieg. Now he’s out of the race.

With only two candidates left in the race, Sanders will carry the torch holding big tech’s feet to the fire. And while Silicon Valley took an early interest in Pete Buttigieg, former Vice President Joe Biden has emerged as the post-Super Tuesday candidate for tech’s status quo.

Still, Sanders doesn’t target tech with the same laser-focused specificity as Warren did, instead lumping tech in with his distaste for centralized wealth accrued elsewhere. In a January interview, Sanders even noted that “it is not just the big tech companies” that have profited from lax antitrust regulation, steering the conversation to Wall Street, his favorite foil.

Amazon is an exception. Sanders has a historic dislike of Amazon, which he occasionally extends to Bezos-owned Washington Post, speculating about “why The Washington Post, which is owned by Jeff Bezos, who owns Amazon, doesn’t write particularly good articles about me” — an ongoing, unfounded criticism he shares with President Trump. Last month, the Vermont senator joined Warren and 13 other Democratic senators in a letter decrying Amazon’s “dismal safety record” and calling for for Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos to “overhaul this profit-at-all-costs culture at your company.” The letter followed a report from the Atlantic about Amazon’s track record on worker injuries. Sanders has also proposed higher progressive corporate tax rates on companies “with large gaps between their CEO and median worker pay.” Those tax hikes would apply to companies with a yearly revenue greater than $100 million.

Silicon Valley could be Biden’s funding lifeline post South Carolina

Tech may not fall directly in his crosshairs as often, but the democratic socialist’s signature message is a natural enemy of power brokers in the tech industry, which has consolidated an unprecedented amount of power and capital in American society. Sanders has openly denounced tech’s “monopolistic tendencies” and has long criticized Amazon’s treatment of its rank-and-file workers while pushing for strong unions — increasingly a hot button issue for tech, as the organized labor movement and rise in worker activism make headlines in the tech community.

Whatever happens in the race, the Democratic party’s leftmost flank will have to soldier on without Warren. Her days in the contest are over, but the candidate who Mark Zuckerberg feared would pose an “existential” threat to Facebook left an indelible mark on the 2020 race that neither her supporters nor detractors are likely to forget any time soon.

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Judge rejects Tulsi Gabbard’s ‘free speech’ lawsuit against Google

Last July, Hawaii representative and longshot Democratic presidential hopeful Tulsi Gabbard filed a lawsuit against Google, accusing the company of violating her First Amendment rights to free speech when it briefly suspended her campaign’s ad account. On Wednesday, California’s Central District Court rejected the suit outright.

Gabbard’s campaign, Tulsi Now, Inc., asked for $50 million in damages from Google for “serious and continuing violations of Tulsi’s right to free speech.” In the suit, her campaign claimed that Google “helps to run elections” through political advertising and search results—an argument District Judge Stephen Wilson firmly rejected.

Tulsi Gabbard sues Google over suspended ads

In dismissing the case, Wilson writes that Gabbard “fails to establish is how Google’s regulation of its own platform is in any way equivalent to a governmental regulation of an election.” When it comes to Google, “an undisputedly private company,” the First Amendment’s free speech protections do not apply. A week ago, another California court reached the same conclusion in a case that right-wing group PragerU brought against YouTube.

In a case of poor timing, Gabbard’s account was suspended for an interval of time following the first presidential debate as viewers sought information about the unfamiliar candidate. In the lawsuit, Gabbard noted that Google took her advertising account offline “in the thick of the critical post-debate period.”

“Since at least June 2019, Google has used its control over online political speech to silence Tulsi Gabbard, a candidate millions of Americans want to hear from,” the suit stated.

Echoing unfounded conservative complaints of tech censorship, Gabbard characterized paid political advertising as free speech, language that Facebook itself would later adopt in defending its lax position on policing political ads.

“This is a threat to free speech, fair elections, and to our democracy, and I intend to fight back on behalf of all Americans,” Gabbard said in a statement at the time.

Gabbard also decried Google’s dominance of the search business, echoing the anti-monopolist tech sentiments expressed by other Democratic candidates. Political figures in both parties have seized on anti-tech sentiment in recent years, and the Hawaii representative’s lawsuit is just one example of politically expedient posturing against major tech platforms.

After the incident, a Google representative explained that the platform automatically flagged Gabbard’s account for unusual activity, a mistake it corrected a short time later.

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Biden stages a Super Tuesday comeback as Sanders fights for the rest in the West

In a newly narrowed four-way contest, Super Tuesday’s broad delegate pool enticed Democratic primary contenders with race’s biggest prizes yet. Fourteen states voted in Tuesday’s primaries, with the key states of Texas and California alone accounting for a combined 643 delegates.

Former Vice President Joe Biden notched important wins early in the evening, taking Virginia and North Carolina, the third most delegate-rich state in Tuesday’s contest. Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders won his home state early in the night, but failed to carve out a foothold in the East Coast and Midwest.

“Just a few days ago the press and the pundits had declared this campaign dead,” Biden announced in a triumphant speech mid-way through the evening. “I am here to report, we are very much alive.”

As of 8:45 p.m. Pacific Time, Biden had collected Alabama, Arkansas, Minnesota, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Massachusetts and Virginia with Sanders taking Colorado, Utah and Vermont. At the time of writing, a winner has yet to be declared in Maine, Texas and California, with the latter state leaning toward Sanders.

Photographer: David Paul Morris/Bloomberg via Getty Images

Biden stormed into Super Tuesday with new momentum, fresh off a vital win in South Carolina over the weekend and some swiftly collected endorsements of his former rivals, including Amy Klobuchar, Pete Buttigieg and Beto O’Rourke. That momentum created a spate of decisive victories for Biden, as the moderate vote appeared to flow easily to him, overwhelming Sanders in some states the Vermont senator was favored in, including Oklahoma, Minnesota and his neighboring state of Massachusetts.

Lacking endorsements from former candidates but not momentum, Bernie Sanders entered Super Tuesday with 60 delegates to Biden’s 54 and Elizabeth Warren’s eight. His results in early voting states, consistent debate performances and grassroots support marked Sanders as the candidate to beat, but those strengths failed to translate into boosted turnout for Sanders in some key states.

In spite of early narratives, delegate totals before Super Tuesday represented just a sliver of the 1,991 delegates necessary to secure the nomination at the Democratic National Convention this July. A total of 1357 delegates are up for grabs on Super Tuesday.

Silicon Valley saw itself in Pete Buttigieg. Now he’s out of the race.

 

Super Tuesday marked the first time Bloomberg appeared on a ballot, but his massive cash spend still resulted in an underwhelming night, with the former mayor only picking up a small handful of delegates in American Samoa. Former New York Mayor Mike Bloomberg entered the formal race with more than $400 million spent on ads but zero delegates. Warren also underperformed Tuesday, with a more competitive race than anticipated even in her home state of Massachusetts, which ultimately went to Biden. Oklahoma also showed no loyalty for Warren, who was born in the state—after choosing Sanders in 2016, Oklahoma opted for Biden in Tuesday’s contest.

Tuesday’s results will reshape the race for the Democratic nomination, much as Biden’s long-promised win in South Carolina breathed new life into a flagging campaign. Beyond likely narrowing into a two-person race, the new dynamics emerging out of Tuesday will shift the framing of the contest as a whole. That change is likely to pit political Biden’s promise of incremental political change more directly against Sanders and democratic socialism.

The 2020 race has challenged the tech industry in more ways than one. With both Trump and Bloomberg stress-testing social platforms with a deluge of ads, tech companies are still trying to figure out where to draw their respective lines on political advertising. Those efforts are on top of the imperative for major platforms to avoid a repeat of 2016 by fending off coordinated disinformation campaigns seeking to roil Americans politics.

Beyond platform manipulation concerns, candidates like Warren and Sanders successfully tapped into mainstream backlash against big tech over the course of their campaigns, cultivating even more criticism for companies already under scrutiny from other parts of the government. Depending on which wing of the party seals the nomination, tech could be facing a very different regulatory environment in the event of a Democratic win come November.

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Silicon Valley saw itself in Pete Buttigieg. Now he’s out of the race

Tech’s darling is out. On Sunday, the 38-year-old Democratic presidential contender stepped out of the race, clearing a path for moderates to coalesce around another candidate on the eve of Super Tuesday’s broad contest for delegates.

Buttigieg, a previous political unknown, ran a surprisingly successful long-shot presidential campaign, making history as the first gay candidate to make a real run at the presidency and vaulting his political profile well above his mayorship of South Bend, Indiana. Buttigieg’s appeal as a young, articulate politician was bolstered early on by his friendliness to Silicon Valley in a race in which tech’s biggest names were cast as villains by the race’s leftmost wing.

As the race began, elite segments of Silicon Valley, including tech leadership and venture capital, sought an alternative to Bernie Sanders. Sanders and his ideological next-door neighbor Elizabeth Warren have made criticisms of consolidated power and wealth a cornerstone of their platforms, with Warren in particular taking direct aim at tech’s biggest success stories or its ruling elite, depending on your perspective. That message was always more likely to resonate with tech’s rank and file workers, while the sector’s better compensated upper echelons turned to Buttigieg and other Democratic candidates who reflected their traditionally liberal values while promising less upheaval for the industry.

Buttigieg was able to appeal to that dual desire, and his young age and proximity to tech power brokers like Mark Zuckerberg, a member of his cohort at Harvard, helped boost his cause among tech-savvy supporters. According to reporting from The Guardian, more than 75 VCs threw their weight behind the Buttigieg campaign as early as July 2019, lauding Buttigieg’s “intellectual vigor” and data-driven thinking—qualities Silicon Valley prizes in itself. One of Facebook’s first 300 users, Buttigieg’s tech fluency offered a striking contrast to the stereotype of tech-inept members of Congress, a frequent complaint within tech in recent regulatory hearings.

“I don’t know if people saw him as a technology culture person,” one member of the VC community told TechCrunch. “It was more like as a smart person who could potentially execute. As a winner.” They characterized him as “persuasive and competent” but “not competent in some technocratic, bloodless way.”

“We want to build a campaign that’s a little disruptive, kind of entrepreneurial. Right now, it feels like a startup,” Buttigieg campaign manager Mike Schmuhl told AP News in April.

For some in Silicon Valley, which tends to think in terms of Silicon Valley, the analogy stuck all the way to the end.

With Buttigieg out of the race, the big question is where his support goes next. Given his moderate policies and new momentum, former Vice President Joe Biden appears likely to receive a boost from Buttigieg’s exit. Still, venture capitalists who spoke with TechCrunch suggested that support is likely to lack the enthusiasm tech had for Buttigieg. “People could have gone with Biden early on,” one Buttigieg supporter noted.

That redirected support may prove tepid compared to Silicon Valley’s initial bet on Buttigieg, but it could be a shot in the arm for Biden if the former Vice President comes out of Tuesday’s big contest looking like a winner.

Silicon Valley could be Biden’s funding lifeline post South Carolina

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Silicon Valley could be Biden’s funding lifeline post South Carolina

Presidential candidate Joe Biden is likely to throw a fundraising lifeline to Silicon Valley donors after his commanding South Carolina victory and heading into the next wave of primaries.

A pro-Biden super Pac, Unite the Country — whose past backers include senior tech figures — is picking up efforts to tap wealthy donors, Treasurer Larry Rasky told CNBC, after the group made several ad-buys in Super-Tuesday states (per a February 28 Federal Election Committee filing).

Past Unite the Country’s benefactors include LinkedIn founder and Greylock Partners VC Reid Hoffman (who contributed $500,000) and Angel Investor Ronald Conway ($250,000), according to FEC data.

Source: FEC filing

Biden revived his presidential-bid from life-support with a resounding 29 point win over Bernie Sanders in Saturday’s South Carolina primary.

But after flailing in the first three contests — Iowa, New Hampshire and Nevada — the former Vice-President’s campaign has reportedly been running on financial fumes.

The last Federal Election Campaign disclosures before South Carolina’s democratic primary showed Biden with $7.1 million cash on hand, compared to Sanders’ nearly $17 million.

The race to become the Democratic-nominee for president is consolidating, post South Carolina, to a Sanders-Biden match-up — after Mayor Pete Buttigieg and billionaire Tom Steyer dropped out. Mayor Mike Bloomberg, who entered the race late, will be on the ballot for the first-time on Super Tuesday, though its not clear if he’ll shift dynamics between the front-runners.

To capture Sanders, who now leads Biden in the delegate count, Biden will need to close the fundraising gap between himself and the Vermont Senator, who doesn’t accept super Pac funds and has raised a large portion of his total $126 million presidential fundraising haul from small contributions by individual donors.

Source: NBC News

For Democrats, fundraising is a big focus of campaign efforts in uncontested states (like New York and California) where they are nearly certain to win in the general-election. Areas with affluent residents, such as the Bay Area and Manhattan, have served as piggy-banks for tapping wealthy donors.

But a fundraising push by Biden and surrogates in Silicon Valley could further expose a political rift within big tech: that of founders and senior executives favoring a moderate candidate, while rank-and file workers “feel the Bern” on campaign donations.

FEC data and analysis by and the LA Times and the Center for Responsive Politics indicate Bernie Sanders has substantially outperformed all candidates in raising small-donations from workers in tech companies. By Times reporting, Sanders has raised, $1 million, or nearly four-times as much as Biden, in small donations from employees at Google, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, and Facebook.

This preference divide within big-tech could align with the differences in each candidate’s policy platforms. Biden’s positions are generally milder on initiatives to police and potentially split up big-tech companies, such as Facebook.

Sanders has been vocal about driving policies that address the pay gap across major tech companies and has called for breaking up Facebook and Amazon.

Founders and tech-workers in California will have a non-monetary option to express their preferences in voting booths tomorrow — as the Golden State is one of 13 in the super Tuesday primary contest. Those results will roll into more primaries, more fundraising and a decision on the 2020 presidential nominee at the Democratic National Convention in Milwaukee this July.

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Trump’s Election Day YouTube takeover feels very different in 2020

According to a report from Bloomberg, the Trump campaign called dibs on some of the most prized ad space online in the days leading up to the 2020 U.S. election.

Starting in early November and continuing onto Election Day itself, the campaign will reportedly command YouTube’s masthead, the space at the very top of the video sharing site’s homepage. YouTube is now the second most popular website globally after the online video platform overtook Facebook in web traffic back in 2018. Bloomberg didn’t report the details of the purchase, but the YouTube masthead space is reported to cost as much as a million dollars a day.

The Trump campaign’s ad buy is likely to rub the president’s many critics the wrong way, but it isn’t unprecedented. In 2012, the Obama campaign bought the same space before Mitt Romney landed the Republican nomination. It’s also not a first for the Trump campaign, which bought banner ads at the top of YouTube last June to send its own message during the first Democratic debate.

Screenshot of Trump campaign’s June 2019 YouTube ads via NPR/YouTube

In spite of the precedent, 2020 is a very different year for political money flowing to tech companies—one with a great degree of newfound scrutiny. The big tech platforms are still honing their respective rules for political advertising as November inches closer, but the kinks are far from ironed out and the awkward dance between politics and tech continues.

The fluidity of the situation is a boon to campaigns eager to plow massive amounts of cash into tech platforms. Facebook remains under scrutiny for its willingness to accept money for political ads containing misleading claims, even as the company is showered in cash by 2020 campaigns. Most notable among them is the controversial candidacy of multi-billionaire Mike Bloomberg, who spent a whopping $33 million on Facebook alone in the last 30 days. In spite of its contentious political ad policies, much-maligned Facebook offers a surprising degree of transparency around what runs on its platform through its robust political ad library, a tool that arose out of the controversy surrounding the 2016 U.S. election.

On the other end of the spectrum, Twitter opted to ban political ads altogether, and is currently working on a way to label “synthetic or manipulated media” intended to mislead users—an effort that could flag non-paid content by candidates, including a recent debate video doctored by the Bloomberg campaign. Twitter is working through its own policy issues in a relatively public way, embracing trial-and-error rather than carving its rules in stone.

Unlike Twitter, YouTube will continue to run political ads, but did mysteriously remove a batch of 300 Trump campaign ads last year without disclosing what policy the ads had violated. Google also announced that it would limit election ad targeting to a few high level categories (age, gender and zip code), a decision the Trump campaign called the “muzzling of political speech.” In spite of its strong stance on microtargeting, Google’s policies around allowing lies in political ads fall closer to Facebook’s anything-goes approach. Google makes a few exceptions, disallowing “misleading claims about the census process” and “false claims that could significantly undermine participation or trust in an electoral or democratic process,” the latter of which leaves an amphitheater-sized amount of room for interpretation.

In recent years, much of the criticism around political advertising has centered around the practice of microtargeting ads to hyper-specific sets of users, a potent technique made possible by the amount of personal data collected by modern social platforms and a strategy very much back in action in 2020. While Trump’s campaign leveraged that phenomenon to great success in 2016, Trump’s big YouTube ad buy is just one part of an effort to see what sticks, advertising to anybody and everybody in the splashiest spot online in the process.

YouTube declined to confirm the Trump campaign’s reported ad buy to TechCrunch, but noted that the practice of buying the YouTube masthead is “common” during elections.

“In the past, campaigns, PACs, and other political groups have run various types of ads leading up to election day,” the spokesperson said. “All advertisers follow the same process and are welcome to purchase the masthead space as long as their ads comply with our policies.”

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Getting tech right in Iowa and elsewhere requires insight into data, human behavior

Hollie Russon Gilman Contributor
Hollie Russon Gilman is a Fellow at New America's Political Reform Program, Lecturer at Columbia University, a Non-Resident Fellow at Georgetown's Beeck Center for Social Impact + Innovation and is the co-author of Civic Power: Rebuilding American Democracy in an Era of Crisis.
More posts by this contributor
Tara Dawson McGuinness Contributor
Tara Dawson McGuinness, a former senior advisor to President Obama, is a Senior Fellow at New America and teaches public policy in the McCourt school at Georgetown University.

What happened in Iowa’s Democratic caucus last week is a textbook example of how applying technological approaches to public sector work can go badly wrong just when we need it to go right.

While it’s possible to conclude that Iowa teaches us that we shouldn’t let tech anywhere near a governmental process, this is the wrong conclusion to reach, and mixes the complexity of what happened and didn’t happen. Technology won’t fix a broken policy and the key is understanding what it is good for.

What does it look like to get technology right in solving public problems? There are three core principles that can help more effectively build public-interest technology: solve an actual problem, design with and for users and their lives in mind and start small (test, improve, test).

Before developing an app or throwing a new technology into the mix in a political process it is worth asking: what is the goal of this app, and what will an app do that will improve on the existing process?

Getting it right starts with understanding the humans who will use what you build to solve an actual problem. What do they actually need? In the case of Iowa, this would have meant asking seasoned local organizers about what would help them during the vote count. It also means talking directly to precinct captains and caucus goers and observing the unique process in which neighbors convince neighbors to move to a different corner of a school gymnasium when their candidate hasn’t been successful. In addition to asking about the idea of a web application, it is critical to test the application with real users under real conditions to see how it works and make improvements.

In building such a critical game-day app, you need to test it under more real-world conditions, which means adoption and ease of use matters. While Shadow (the company charged with this build) did a lightweight test with some users, there wasn’t the runway to adapt or learn from those for whom the app was designed. The app may have worked fine, but that doesn’t matter if people didn’t use it or couldn’t download it.

One model of how this works can be found in the Nurse Family Partnership, a high-impact nonprofit that helps first-time, low-income moms.

This nonprofit has adapted to have feedback loops from its moms and nurses via email and text messages. It even has a full-time role “responsible for supporting the organization’s vision to scale plan by listening and learning from primary, secondary and internal customers to assess what can be done to offer an exceptional Nurse-Family Partnership experience.”

Building on its program of in-person assistance, the Nurse Family Partnership co-designed an app (with Hopelab, a social innovation lab in collaboration with behavioral-science based software company Ayogo). The Goal Mama app builds upon the relationship between nurses and moms. It was developed with these clients in mind after research showed the majority of moms in the program were using their smartphones extensively, so this would help meet moms where they were. Through this approach of using technology and data to address the needs of their workforce and clients, they have served 309,787 moms across 633 counties and 41 states.

Another example is the work of Built for Zero, a national effort focused on the ambitious goal of ending homelessness across 80 cities and counties. Community organizers start with the personal challenges of the unhoused — they know that without understanding the person and their needs, they won’t be able to build successful interventions that get them housed. Their work combines a methodology of human-centered organizing with smart data science to deliver constant assessment and improvements in their work, and they have a collaboration with the Tableau foundation to build and train communities to collect data with new standards and monitor progress toward a goal of zero homelessness.

Good tech always starts small, tests, learns and improves with real users. Parties, governments and nonprofits should expand on the learning methods that are common to tech startups and espoused by Eric Reis in The Lean Startup. By starting with small tests and learning quickly, public-interest technology acknowledges the high stakes of building technology to improve democracy: real people’s lives are at stake. With questions about equity, justice, legitimacy and integrity on the line, starting small helps ensure enough runway to make important changes and work out the kinks.

Take for example the work of Alia. Launched by the National Domestic Workers Alliance (NDWA), it’s the first benefits portal for house cleaners. Domestic workers do not typically receive employee benefits, making things like taking a sick day or visiting a doctor impossible without losing pay.

Its easy-to-use interface enables people who hire house cleaners to contribute directly to their benefits, allowing workers to receive paid time off, accident insurance and life insurance. Alia’s engineers benefited from deep user insights gained by connecting to a network of house cleaners. In the increasing gig economy, the Alia model may be instructive for a range of employees across local, state and federal levels. Obama organizers in 2008 dramatically increased volunteerism (up to 18%) just by A/B testing the words and colors used for the call-to-action on their website.

There are many instructive public interest technologies that focus on designing not just for the user. This includes work in civil society such as Center for Civic Design, ensuring people can have easy and seamless interactions with government, and The Principles for Digital Development, the first of which is “design with the user.” There is also work being done inside governments, from the Government Digital Service in the U.K. to the work of the United States Digital Service, which was launched in the Obama administration.

Finally, it also helps to deeply understand the conditions in which technology will be used. What are the lived experiences of the people who will be using the tool? Did the designers dig in and attend a caucus to see how paper has captured the moving of bodies and changing of minds in gyms, cafes and VFW halls?

In the case of Iowa, it requires understanding the caucuses norms, rules and culture. A political caucus is a unique situation.

Not to mention, this year the Iowa Caucus deployed several process changes to increase transparency but also complexify the process, which needed to also be taken into account when deploying a tech solution. Understanding the conditions in which technology is deployed requires a nuanced understanding of policies and behavior and how policy changes can impact design choices.

Building a technical solution without doing the user-research to see what people really need runs the risk of reducing credibility and further eroding trust. Building the technology itself is often the simple part. The complex part is relational. It requires investing in capacity to engage, train, test and iterate.

We are accustomed to same-day delivery and instantaneous streaming in our private and social lives, which raises our expectations for what we want from the public sector. The push to modernize and streamline is what leads to believing an app is the solution. But building the next killer app for our democracy requires more than just prototyping a splashy tool.

Public-interest technology means working toward the broader, difficult challenge of rebuilding trust in our democracy. Every time we deploy tech for the means of modernizing a process, we need to remember this end goal and make sure we’re getting it right.

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After Iowa caucus flub, can tech be trusted in elections?

An app intended to speed up reporting of election results for the Iowa caucuses has failed spectacularly, not only confusing the electorate but perhaps poisoning their feelings toward making any technological “improvements” to the voting process whatsoever.

TechCrunch staff reporters Brian Heater, Jonathan Shieber, Zack Whittaker, Devin Coldewey and Ingrid Lunden discussed the issue informally.

Brian Heater: We all agree that this is a good sign of a healthy democracy, right?

Jonathan Shieber: Totally agree with Brian here.

Brian Heater: I’m legitimately finding it difficult to discuss these sorts of things without delving into the conspiratorial. That said, I think it’s far more likely that this was just a massive fuck-up on the part of the Iowa Dems. Chalking it up to a conspiracy is honestly giving them entirely too much credit.

Devin Coldewey: But what’s the nature of the fuck-up? Fundamentally?

Brian Heater: An app that wasn’t tested at the scale of a statewide election. The more we move away from more traditional means of accounting, the more of these we’re going to see.