How Technology is Entering the American Political Arena

As the electioneering is gaining momentum in the U.S., tech companies are offering a slew of solutions to make political processes efficient for the parties and candidates.

Picture this: In an effort to modernize the tactics and operations of America’s conservative grassroots organizations and campaigns in this critical election year, American Majority Action has announced a partnership with software outfit Political Gravity for a new high-tech campaign management program.

The new software called Gravity is a political technology tool to help communicate with and mobilize conservative voters across the country. American Majority Action will provide the software free to tea party groups and other conservative grassroots organizations around the country. It was announced Thursday, March 29.

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Meanwhile, financial management solutions company Intuit has announced that GoPayment, its free mobile credit card app and card reader hardware, has been enhanced for political donations.

Fundraisers can now use GoPayment to process credit card donations on mobile devices while collecting the donor information often required of campaigns to be legally compliant. (Read: How to Collect Political Donations Using GoPayment)

And Socialbakers, a social media analytics company, said it has launched a campaign to identify the most (and least) influential, engaging and popular presidential candidates on Facebook, including President Obama, via public information on the world’s largest social network. (Read: Meet the U.S. Presidential Candidates on Facebook)

Earlier, mobile social networking application Foursquare had partnered with a team of political strategists, designers and activists to release the official “I Voted” badge in conjunction with launching a real-time visualization of check-ins for Election Day. (Read: Say ‘I Voted’ with Your Foursquare Badge)

It’s believed that tech tools can even encourage voters to vote in elections. In answer to the question of which communications tool would be most likely to get more young Americans to vote, 66% of Millennials indicated in a survey that Facebook reminder messages, 58% indicated text reminder messages, 38% indicated email reminder messages, 28% indicated public service announcements, and 13% indicated telephone reminders. (Read: Can Facebook Inspire Youth to Vote?)

Now comes Gravity software. “This is essentially a campaign in box that brings the most modern, effective tactics down to the grassroots level,” said Drew Ryun, president of American Majority Action, which promotes the free market, American individualism.

Gravity fuses Heat Mapping Technology, smartphone applications and tablet technology seamlessly with hard voter ID modeling.

It uses advanced data-mining to pollinate voter databases, walk lists and phone bank targets. The software enables volunteers to canvass neighborhoods and ask person-to-person survey questions of voters, then rapidly flip those survey answers into a Get-Out-The-Vote model that gets smarter as more data is uploaded.

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With a comprehensive voter database broken down by voting intensity, gender, age, and other pieces of auxiliary data, Gravity gives candidates and organizations the ability to reach the right voters with the right message, says the company.

Among other features, it eliminates nearly all of the inefficiencies that campaigns encounter in retail politics, from targeting the “right” voters to canvassing to database management, it was stated.

Photo courtesy: American Majority Action