Elect Tech

In 1976 a Princeton junior named John Aristotle Phillips wrote a paper so engaging that it had to be classified by the Federal Government and Pakistani agents tried to kidnap him. Phillips' paper, which showed how easy it would be for a rogue group to build a suitcase-size nuclear bomb, used source material that was all public but when assembled into one piece became a top-secret document. The story of his project and the security concerns it raised went nuclear in the national press. He got an A.

Six years later, Phillips discovered a way to make a quieter and immeasurably greater impact on politics. He and his brother Dean founded a company committed to an analogous task: unearthing and assembling hidden but public information voter rolls, driver's licenses, census data for use by activists and politicians. Information and connectivity fuel democracy, Phillips reasoned, so the more that people have of each, the easier participation becomes.

In 20 years, Aristotle International has become one of the most influential, if invisible, private-sector players in politics. Its newest software for candidates, grass-roots organizations and political-action committees, the company boasts, provides users with a shortcut to information that would typically require 20 years' experience in political-campaign work to gather. Clients can search Aristotle's database of 157 million voters, campaign donors, fund raisers and others, drilling for untapped supporters. The company tries to be "scrupulously bipartisan," says a spokesman, and sees itself as a utility, similar to an Internet provider, that sells to anybody.

Much has been made of the Howard Dean campaign's knack for online fund raising and MoveOn.org 's success in uniting like-minded netizens. But that's just part of a much larger paradigm shift. Real campaign technology is just now booting up. Powerful search tools often honed on vast, private consumer databases are playing increasingly important roles in shaping election strategies. Technology managers have become important campaign advisers, providing precision guidance on how campaign funds should be allocated and what messages might resonate. "Elections are very much like one-day sales," says Dean Phillips, president of Aristotle.

The Holy Grail here is the ability to find valuable patterns in otherwise incomprehensible amounts of data. For several years, boutique investment shops and the big Wall Street firms have had success aggregating oceanic-scale, real-time data and churning them through a complex, highly proprietary black box to come up with esoteric investment strategies. Consumer companies for years have turned to data managers such as Acxiom and infoUSA to see how their products and those of their competitors play with various groups. Logic might dictate that Toyota Prius drivers wear Birkenstocks, but a deep data dive might uncover a fetish for Ferragamos.

The Democratic and Republican parties have grafted significant amounts of consumer data onto their public-records databases, hoping to discover veins of unmined gold. Increasingly, politics and the personal-data industry are in cahoots. General Wesley Clark, the former presidential candidate and former Acxiom board member, opened doors in Washington for the data giant. And Karl Rove, George W. Bush's top political strategist, worked in the direct-marketing industry before he entered the political arena.

"Political candidates are seen in many ways as a product today, so the process in a lot of ways is similar," says Don Hinman, a data-quality expert at Acxiom. But you can't always sell candidates like soap. Rules of branding don't apply when your product changes his policies every two months. If a party doesn't have a strong candidate with a resonating message, no software in the world will solve that problem. In a nation split down party lines, though, any gain contributed by fancy systems or any loss caused by glitches or misinterpretation could alter an election.