This election season marked a major shift from the traditional ground game of door-to-door get out the vote efforts to «Big Data politics» – in which algorithms are run in the cloud on databases of voter information to figure out who volunteers should target.
As captured in Rackspace’s 2012 election «Powered by the Cloud» infographic, nearly every digital component of the 2012 election utilized the cloud: from the smartphone campaign apps to the social media systems to the super-secret voter information files. The cloud industry was well equipped to handle the terabytes of data-crunching demanded of the multi-billion dollar campaigns. For example, over 80 million voters will use cloud-based networks and smartphone apps to access information critical to their voting decision, a 200% increase over 2008’s election.