Cambridge Analytica and the Elections Industry

Cambridge Analytica and the Elections Industry
“Men and women in my lifetime have died fighting for the right to vote: people like James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner, who were murdered while registering black voters in Mississippi in 1964, and Viola Liuzzo, who was murdered by the Ku Klux Klan in 1965 during the Selma march for voting rights.”    -  Jeff Greenfield
We have been taught that the right to vote is sacred.
It is a right for which many have fought and died. The stories of the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa, of the Civil Rights Movement in the US have etched in our minds images of this bold self-sacrificing struggle for this precious right.
In our own country, this right was only available to propertied people who had a command of the English language up to 1946 when universal adult suffrage was a benefit of the anti-colonial struggle which erupted with the Butler Riots of 1937. Before that ex-slaves who were property less and ex-indentures who held on to their Bhojpuri language were denied that right simply because of their condition.
It has also been drummed into our consciousness that one man, one vote and the vote for elected representatives are hallmarks of democratic systems defined as the essence of freedom.
We are even told that to vote is our civic duty and those who do not are ridiculed or voting for ‘the other side’.
Over the years our vote has, however, become a commodity to be demanded by and sold to the highest bidder by the captains of a new (but actually not New) industry - the Elections Industry.
The Elections Industrialists
Since the Cold War and the imposition of the ‘New World Order’, the Anglo-American axis has defined societies as “democratic” once they operate the 2-party system in which the majority of the body politic are converted into election fodder for 2 parties which represent the same socio-economic interest – the monied and propertied oligarchy.
Our right to vote is reduced to a ritual of the ‘electoral cycle’. Once every so many years we are told our duty is to vote one or other party into office. Regardless of how badly they neglect our needs to ensure the interests of the real power behind the throne – the parasitic oligarchy as it was fashionable to call them in the 90’s – we are told “Just wait till the next election.
Three minutes in the voting booth is what our right to vote has been reduced to.
Without the right to select candidates; without the Right of Recall; without the Right to propose legislation; without the right to participate in decision-making on all matters that affect our lives, we, the electors, the voters are reduced to voting machines to be corralled in support of the elected over whom we exercise no control.
Our right to vote is commodified and competed for by a select group of ‘professional politicians’ and the Elections Industrialists have created elaborate Elections Industry whose operations is the capturing of the ‘vote’ for the caricatures that political parties have become.
On a world scale, this Elections Industry includes all kinds of corporations that are really mercenaries specializing in public relations campaigns to manipulate opinion and votes in favour of this or that electoral party.
The Elections Industrialists include Public Relations firms, consultants, elections strategists, pollsters, psychological profilers, hi-tech data-mining outfits – all engaged micro-targeting voters on behalf of political parties and their backers.
The Cambridge Analytica- Strategic Communication Laboratories-AggregateIQ (CA-SCL-AIQ) data mining web of companies is the latest form of these Elections Industry players.
Christopher Wylie, the celebrated whistleblower helped set up Cambridge Analytica and describes himself as a ‘data scientist’. He also encouraged his friend, Jeffrey Silvester to create AggregateIQ to get piece of the SCL-CA action in Canada.
While SCL, the parent company, boasts about their activities in elections from Brexit to the Trump campaign, in Nigeria, St. Kitts-Nevis, Trinidad and Tobago and up to 200 elections worldwide.
Wylie also said that SCL does “psychological warfare work for NATO”.
The Elections Industry is Not New
This Elections Industry in not new. CA-SCL-AIQ are its latest incarnations and data-mining from Facebook using innocent-sounding apps like “thisisyourdigitallife” obtain information from voters claiming to be doing social research.
What they do not tell unsuspecting citizens is that their data will be used for electoral or political purposes. When it is not outright theft of information, it is obtained by deception.
The Cambridge Analytica data app was not the first of its kind.
In 2007, the Psychometric Centre at Cambridge University created an app called “myPersonality” which they described as “an improved method to reach large samples of people for social research purposes”.
CA also captured data otherwise building profiles of millions of Facebook users as the Facebook founder admitted just recently to be many times more than Wylie first suggested.
The use of these apps by CA is a step up from the old methods of telephone surveys and direct polling of electors in various constituencies or polling divisions in the different countries
Advertising companies, messaging services and other entities are partners with CA-SCL-AIQ in the voter manipulation exercises and other work for state agencies like the US military and even international agencies.
There are also various commercial companies who are data-brokers offering data on citizens (voters) in various countries. They obtain data from everything from telephone directories to geo-demographic data and even lists of party contributors available where party financing law requires the establishment of such records.
They do all of this for huge amounts of money.
Wylie’s claim of a US$200,000 contract with a TT political party or even with the Government or a Ministry here is a drop in the bucket of the earnings of the corporations operating globally in the Elections Industry.
The Elections Industry in TT
The Elections Industry is at work in Trinidad and Tobago and has been for some time.
In 1981, it can be recalled that the ONR campaign saw the open presence of glitzy PR firms from the US in our elections.
Since then all kinds of consultants, advisers, public relations and campaign ‘experts’ have been increasingly involved in the campaigns of various political parties in general and local government elections.
TT politicians and activists are also engaged in other Caribbean elections as consultants and strategists.
Micro-targeting at different levels of sophistication with titles like VIM etc. are used to try and psychologically steer voters to give their vote to one or other party or their candidates in elections.
While the Cambridge Analytical scandal has become a new opportunity for politicians to point fingers and make accusations against each other, the body politic must not lose sight of the fact that our electoral and political processes have become a new source of profit for the Elections Industrialists.
Our sacred right to vote is cheapened by the operations of these vote merchants and the political parties who are their clients.
This is not merely a matter of the capturing of our information without informed consent or a violation of our privacy rights or about jailing some politician or politicians for involvement in that violation.
It is about the manipulation of our vote and of our electoral processes which is not in the service or interest of the majority of the electors, the majority of the body politic.
We must not lose sight of the forest for the trees. We must refuse to be distracted from the fundamental issues.

Clyde Weatherhead
A Citizen Fighting for
Democratic Renewal
of our Society
5 April 2018