Guess what?! Big data "knows" who you will vote for in next elections!

Do politicians build strong platforms or do they just follow Big Data to win in the elections?

Elections: The process that involves thousands of people and takes massive character every few years across all elected governments on earth. Elections are the time when huge campaigns run at each distinct part of the countries and when consultants prepare massive polls and analyze loads of information to identify and target millions of voters.

The US Politicians learned fast to adopt Big Data and now they apply it to the attitudes and preferences of the population to “understand why people are voting for them or why they’re not, and that has the effect of hopefully being able to change policy in a more meaningful and democratic way”. The 2012 US elections displayed how Big Data could be used for turning gigantic campaign data into detailed practical information. Data analyst Nate Silver became a celebrity when he managed to predict the results in each of the 50 states accurately.

Few contraindications for the application of Big Data in elections exist though. In the 1948 elections, the polls (Big Data back then) predicted a Thomas Dewey victory over Harry Truman. That election marked the first time pollsters relied on telephone surveys, giving them access to more voters. It turned out that a lot of Truman supporters didn't have phones. The real results turned out to be otherwise. Or bringing parallels to nowadays, when huge campaigns and platforms are built to count the polls of voters on Facebook and other social platforms we must consider that “the elderly woman in Philadelphia, who doesn't have a photo ID, also probably doesn't tweet much or otherwise contribute to the 15 terabytes of new information on Facebook every day”. This example shows that Big Data can be very helpful in our everyday life and that no one can escape from it, but analysts need to keep their critical mind to not blindly fall into the data gap.