Voter Intention Collection System also known by its acronym VICS is a bespoke canvassing software system with a voter database originally created for the Vote Leave campaign for the

2016 United Kingdom European Union membership referendum The United Kingdom European Union membership referendum, commonly referred to as the EU referendum or the Brexit referendum, took place on 23 June 2016 in the United Kingdom (UK) and Gibraltar to ask the electorate whether the country shoul ...

. Vote leave director Dominic Cummings have claimed it was crucial to the success of that campaign while others have claimed other systems were also crucial. An open-source version is available.

Etymology

The acronym ''VICS'' as well as standing for ''Voter Intention Collection System'' was also the nickname of

Victoria Woodcock Victoria Woodcock was the operations director for the Vote Leave campaign for the 2016 referendum vote for the United Kingdom to leave the European Union. Dominic Cummings and Paul Goodman claim Woodcock was a key person to the success of the Vo ...

, operations director of Vote Leave who project managed the creation of the system.

History

BBC political editor Laura Kuenssberg has commented an insider in the Vote Leave Campaign had told her they were looking at ways to "find a way of mashing the mountain of data that we generate in daily life online with more normal ways of measuring political support". Tom Waterhouse, deputy head of the ground campaign for vote leave, said Stein Fletcher built the VICS system. The location of a GitHub

open source Open source is source code that is made freely available for possible modification and redistribution. Products include permission to use the source code, design documents, or content of the product. The open-source model is a decentralized sof ...

repository under an MIT license that could build the VICS system was made known by Cummings in a blog post in October 2016.

Technical

Operation

Waterhouse described the way VICS worked for the ground campaign can be summarised as follows: VICS would be loaded with a "model", a

predictive algorithm A prediction (Latin ''præ-'', "before," and ''dicere'', "to say"), or forecast, is a statement about a future event or data. They are often, but not always, based upon experience or knowledge. There is no universal agreement about the exact ...

used to predict the percentage of

Eurosceptic Euroscepticism, also spelled as Euroskepticism or EU-scepticism, is a political position involving criticism of the European Union (EU) and European integration. It ranges from those who oppose some EU institutions and policies, and seek reform ...

voters at the level of individual streets when combined with statistics from the 2014 general and European elections. With minimal cross checking the prediction from doorstep canvassing activists were able to target specific addresses where there was likely to be a leave voter on polling day.

Components

The user interface for the client was developed as a

Single-page application A single-page application (SPA) is a web application or website that interacts with the user by dynamically rewriting the current web page with new data from the web server, instead of the default method of a web browser loading entire new pages. ...

using

AngularJS AngularJS is a discontinued free and open-source JavaScript-based web framework for developing single-page applications. It was maintained mainly by Google and a community of individuals and corporations. It aimed to simplify both the development ...

. The

application Application may refer to: Mathematics and computing * Application software, computer software designed to help the user to perform specific tasks ** Application layer, an abstraction layer that specifies protocols and interface methods used in a c ...

tier Tier may refer to: Groupings *Organizational, a ranking relationship involving order in a collective and its subordinate components *Ranking, a relationship involving order between a set of observations or variables *Data center tiers, Telecommu ...

was developed with Java using a Spring framework To achieve the installation from the source on a server several components must be pre-installed including

PostgreSQL PostgreSQL (, ), also known as Postgres, is a free and open-source relational database management system (RDBMS) emphasizing extensibility and SQL compliance. It was originally named POSTGRES, referring to its origins as a successor to the In ...

redis Redis (; Remote Dictionary Server) is an in-memory data structure store, used as a distributed, in-memory key–value database, cache and message broker, with optional durability. Redis supports different kinds of abstract data structures, su ...

and Apache Maven. Data is transferred between the user interface and application tier using REST over the

HTTP protocol The Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) is an application layer protocol in the Internet protocol suite model for distributed, collaborative, hypermedia information systems. HTTP is the foundation of data communication for the World Wide Web, w ...

serialized as

JSON JSON (JavaScript Object Notation, pronounced ; also ) is an open standard file format and data interchange format that uses human-readable text to store and transmit data objects consisting of attribute–value pairs and arrays (or other ser ...

Significance debate

There are claims the intelligence VICS enabled the Vote Leave campaign to cost-effectively deliver over one billion targeted advertisements over social media with most via Facebook. Others claims VICS was not as capable or effective as it was claimed to be, with some of Cummings' claimed functionality already available on Facebook. Information technology from

Aggregate IQ AggregateIQ (AIQ) previously known as SCL Canada is a Canadian political consultancy and technology company, based in Victoria, British Columbia. History AIQ was founded in 2013 by Zack Massingham, a former university administrator and Jeff Sil ...

is also claimed to have provided important and controversial support to the Vote Leave Campaign.

References

* * * * * * {{Refend Voter databases Software using the MIT license