Below is the video of the PIA response I received fully redacted concerning the communication between the county and Civis Analytics.
Civis Analytics was born out of President Obama’s re-election campaign and changed the game from gut-level guesswork to data-driven campaigning. Much of the direction of this effort was reportedly originally based on the counsel of Google’s Eric Schmidt, who made an investment to keep the Obama Campaign’s analytics group, previously known as “the Cave,” together.
The newly formed company, Civis Analytics, is headed by 39-year-old data wiz, Dan Wagner, who is often credited as having produced Obama’s 5 million-vote margin of victory through his bottom-up analytics strategy that let the data do the directing. Businessweek reports that the company will be staffed by two dozen of his former employees during the campaign, with ownership being shared by both the team and their angel investor, Schmidt.
Gabriel Burt, the Lead Analytics Engineer for the 2012 Obama campaign will serve as the company’s CTO. Burt has a background developing web and analytics software at Novell and IBM, as well as work during college at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign for the Nuclear Radiation Laboratory, the Institute for Computational Cosmology, NASA, and the NCSA.
During the election campaign, the group developed analytic models in which they ran over 65,000 simulations each night to project who was winning in battleground states. Armed with voter contact data, they would make as many as 9,000 calls in a night to measure broad public opinion in order to develop statistical models (including social networks) that they would then use for highly targeted campaign efforts, leveraging a network of volunteers.
“Thousands of staff and millions of volunteers from across states and backgrounds spoke to millions of their fellow Americans,” says the company website. “The strategy of the campaign was built by the voters we spoke to, and analytics was the bridge. From millions of data points, we constructed the most accurate voter targeting models ever used in a national campaign. We predicted the election outcome in every battleground state within one point. And our work guided decision-making and resource optimization across the campaign.”
Starting to see where this is going? A data analytics group who worked for Obama’s Campaign is receiving LARGE contracts through partisan County contractors to pull your data. Remember how the 2020 Elections drop boxes and drive-thru voting locations were *strategically placed* in order to allegedly manipulate the turnout of the elections results? That was decided by companies like Civis Analytics, inc.
Payments made to CIVIS
Listen to this episode with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to The Houston Comical to listen to this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.
