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Clinton Campaign Relied Heavily on Computer Algorithm

posted by on Saturday November 19 2016, @01:14PM   
from the simon-says-campaign-in-pennsylvania dept.

MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for chromas

The Clinton presidential campaign used a complex computer algorithm called Ada to assist in many of the most important decisions during the race.

According to aides, a raft of polling numbers, public and private, were fed into the algorithm, as well as ground-level voter data meticulously collected by the campaign. Once early voting began, those numbers were factored in, too.

What Ada did, based on all that data, aides said, was run 400,000 simulations a day of what the race against Trump might look like. A report that was spit out would give campaign manager Robby Mook and others a detailed picture of which battleground states were most likely to tip the race in one direction or another — and guide decisions about where to spend time and deploy resources.

Of course, the results are only as good as the data. Since the outcome of the election was different than most poll predictions, it seems like Ada may have had a Garbage In, Garbage Out problem.

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Original Submission

• Abdication (Score: 1) by charon on Saturday November 19 2016, @11:29PM

  by charon (5660) on Saturday November 19 2016, @11:29PM (#429688) Journal

  This may be too late to spur any discussion, but I am seriously intrigued and worried that a group of intelligent people engaged in a serious endeavor, which, from their perspective, will decide the future of their their country would abdicate their responsibility to make balanced, informed and, above all, intuitive choices in favor of an algorithm (not even a full fledged artificially intelligent agent, insofar as modern AI like IBM's Watson exists). Data drives the world these days, and, while there's no putting that genie back in the bottle, why is the data driving us instead of the other way around. For decades politicians have been derided for not taking a stand on an issue until they poll their constituents; fair enough, they are supposed to represent us. But does anyone speak their mind without this fine grained data telling them what to do? The fundamental question this story makes me ask is: Who was in charge of the campaign? The candidate or the data? This will only get worse; each election cycle campaigns have touted themselves as being more informed, more data-driven, more engaged with the voters on an individual (but really that means aggregate) basis. In 2020 will Watson be the hand inside the puppet candidate?