Kathy Sheridan: The online threat to the integrity of Irish elections lies within

People of a certain age will recall a time when canny canvassers could stand on a hill overlooking a townland and pronounce on the tribal affiliation of each household. Put a sack on a donkey, call it Fianna Fáil and they’ll vote for it, a rural candidate in a heap of trouble once assured me during a canvas.

We’ve moved on, we think. The floating voter is king now. Unshackled from old Civil War voting patterns we take pride in our PR electoral system, enthuse about televised debates as a good night in, and are never more delighted than in the throes of a 10-day count. The stubby pencils look a bit Luddite but are unhackable. We are a sophisticated electorate, we reckon.

But here’s the question. If the proudly independent-minded floating voter is king, why do campaign strategists bother to shovel mountains of hard cash into the digital gods such as Facebook and Twitter?

No election strategist worth their salt would ever again present a campaign plan without some elements of the Trump 2016 and Brexit Leave referendum writ large

Last September, Channel 4 News got its hands on a vast cache of data used by Donald Trump’s 2016 digital campaign team, encompassing almost 200 million American voters. So detailed was this data – scraped and tricked out of users’ accounts by analytics companies such as Cambridge Analytica – that Trump strategists managed to identify millions of unhelpful individual voters.

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They named this group “Deterrence”, described by Trump’s chief data scientist as people that the campaign “hope don’t show up to vote”.

No fewer than 3.5 million Black Americans went into the Deterrence file, to be specifically targeted with anti-Clinton negative advertising, disinformation bile and lies – the kind that makes a soft Clinton voter decide they’re all the same and give up. Mission accomplished.

Voter manipulation

No one can measure the effect of this kind of data-gathering and voter manipulation on Trump’s shock 2016 victory but at a minimum, it reveals motivation. And that micro-targeting and manipulation worked.

No election strategist worth their salt would ever again present a campaign plan without some elements of the Trump 2016 and Brexit Leave referendum writ large.

So it’s no surprise that political parties have big internal voter databases. Or that people have become wary of how such data is acquired and then used. We live in a time when every trivial query to a website prompts a consent box even if few bother to investigate what they are consenting to – but we know we are giving something away. We simply haven’t learned to properly investigate or value it.

As a political party, Sinn Féin is far from alone in its creation of a big internal voter database or in ranking its voters from “soft” to “hard” to “legacy”. But do other parties encourage members to “elicit” information from Facebook users which could be cross-referenced with the party’s internal system to identify home addresses? And are they then encouraged to follow up with a doorstep canvass? Where are the boundaries ?

Other parties and Sinn Féin critics are welcome to tell us where they draw the line.

But there is another strand to this. Sinn Féin has chosen to register its internal voter database, packed with voter details, to a US-hosted domain. Some of its Facebook accounts are managed from Serbia and Germany. Why would any all-Ireland political party register a hugely sensitive database beyond this island? Why are its accounts being managed from other countries ?

Irish unity

Last month, questions were raised about a fairly lavish US advertising campaign run by Friends of Sinn Féin with banner ads calling for the Irish Government to plan for and promote Irish unity and for the British government to set a date for a referendum on a united Ireland.

Fine Gael TD Jennifer Carroll Mac Neill has noted that a half-page ad in the New York Times alone cost upwards of $90,000 and that according to filings lodged with the US government, the Sinn Féin group had raised $295,000 in one six-month period to April 2020.

You don’t have to be a diehard political opponent to whistle at that amount of money being raised outside of the State by our chief Opposition party in one six-month period, or to question the wisdom of outside funds being harnessed to influence the affairs of a bloodied island where good people fight hard, daily battles to tame tribalism and promote reconciliation.

Sudden compulsion

Many questions were also raised about the DUP’s sudden compulsion to lash out more than £400,000 worth of someone else’s money on pro-Leave advertising just a couple of weeks before the 2016 Brexit referendum.

We still do not know the ultimate origin of the money or why did a modest, standalone party suddenly decided to splash hundreds of thousands of pounds in jurisdictions well beyond the average DUP constituent’s interests. The funding, manner and motivation behind a direct attempt to influence the UK’s most important political and societal direction-shift for a generation remains a mystery five years later. Peter Geoghegan’s energetic investigations leave us with highly plausible theories but the DUP has never had to explain itself.

In a healthy democracy, these questions should not be left hanging. In the old days we lamented the Civil War tribalism, the lack of privacy, the absence of transparency and the sense that decisions were being taken over our heads. How much has changed ?