Voter Intention Collection System

The acronym VICS as well as standing for Voter Intention Collection System was also the nickname of Victoria Woodcock, operations director of Vote Leave who project managed the creation of the system.{{Sfnp|Cummings|2016}}

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".{{Sfnp|Kuenssberg|2016}} Tom Waterhouse, deputy head of the ground campaign for vote leave, said Stein Fletcher built the VICS system.{{Sfnp|Waterhouse|2016}}

The location of a GitHub open source repository under an MIT license that could build the VICS system was made known by Cummings in a blog post in October 2016.{{Sfnp|Cummings|2016}}

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 used to predict the percentage of Eurosceptic 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.{{Sfnp|Waterhouse|2016}}

The user interface for the client was developed as a Single-page application using AngularJS. The application tier was developed with Java using a Spring framework{{Sfnp|varahamihira|2016}} To achieve the installation from the source on a server several components must be pre-installed including PostgreSQL, redis and Apache Maven. Data is transferred between the user interface and application tier using REST over the HTTP protocol serialized as JSON.{{Sfnp|varahamihira|2016}}

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.{{Sfnp|Kuenssberg|2016}} 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.{{Sfnp|Carrington|2016}} Information technology from Aggregate IQ is also claimed to have provided important and controversial support to the Vote Leave Campaign.{{Sfnp|Cadwalladr|2018}}

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• {{Cite news|last=Cadwalladr|first=Carole|date=24 March 2018|title=The Brexit whistleblower: 'Did Vote Leave use me? Was I naive?

|newspaper=The Guardian|access-date=22 June 2020|url=https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2018/mar/24/brexit-whistleblower-shahmir-sanni-interview-vote-leave-cambridge-analytica

|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20200607174509/https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2018/mar/24/brexit-whistleblower-shahmir-sanni-interview-vote-leave-cambridge-analytica

|archive-date=7 June 2020|url-status=live|url-access=limited|author-link=Carole Cadwalladr}}

• {{Cite web|last=Cummings|first=Dominic|date=29 October 2016|title=On the referendum #20: the campaign, physics and data science – Vote Leave's 'Voter Intention Collection System' (VICS) now available for all

|url=https://dominiccummings.com/2016/10/29/on-the-referendum-20-the-campaign-physics-and-data-science-vote-leaves-voter-intention-collection-system-vics-now-available-for-all/

|access-date=26 May 2020|website=dominiccummings|authorlink=Dominic Cummings|url-status=live|archive-date=26 May 2020

|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20200526180037/https://dominiccummings.com/2016/10/29/on-the-referendum-20-the-campaign-physics-and-data-science-vote-leaves-voter-intention-collection-system-vics-now-available-for-all/}}

• {{cite news|last=Carrington|first=Joshua|date=7 November 2016|title=The Vote Leave campaign wasn't as clever as it thinks it was

|url-access=limited|url-status=live|access-date=29 May 2020|newspaper=New Statesman|edition=UK|location=United Kingdom

|url=https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/staggers/2016/11/vote-leave-campaign-wasn-t-clever-it-thinks-it-was

|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20190815004227/https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/staggers/2016/11/vote-leave-campaign-wasn-t-clever-it-thinks-it-was

|archive-date=15 August 2019}}

• {{Cite news|last=Kuenssberg|first=Laura|date=1 November 2016|title=It's the data, stupid

|url=https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-37841605|access-date=22 June 2020|url-status=live|archive-date=30 Jan 2020

|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20200130185939/https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-37841605|authorlink=Laura Kuenssberg}}

• {{Cite web|author=varahamihira|date=10 November 2016|title=Celestial Winter / Vics

|website=GitHub|id=readme.md|url=https://github.com/celestial-winter/vics|access-date=20 June 2020

|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20181122080547/https://github.com/celestial-winter/vics|archive-date=22 November 2018}}

• {{cite news|last=Waterhouse|first=Tom|date=2 September 2016|title=The inside story of how the Brexit vote was won

|url-access=limited|url-status=live|access-date=30 May 2020|newspaper=New Statesman|edition=UK|location=United Kingdom

|url=https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/the-inside-story-of-how-the-brexit-vote-was-won

|archive-url=https://archive.today/20200530052824/https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/the-inside-story-of-how-the-brexit-vote-was-won|archive-date=30 May 2020}}

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Category:Voter databases

Category:Software using the MIT license