Koch Industries Is Staffing Up with Voter Data Scientists to Tip the November Election to the Extreme Right - 2018-07-23

Koch Industries Is Staffing Up with Voter Data Scientists to Tip the November Election to the Extreme Right July 23, 2018, Pam Martens, CounterPunch

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For at least forty years, Charles and David Koch, majority owners of a sprawling fossil fuels multi-national company called Koch Industries, have been blurring the lines between tax-exempt organizations and their own corporate political interests. We can now report that the blurred lines have disappeared. Koch Industries is unabashedly advertising for IT professionals at Indeed, LinkedIn, and at its own website to staff a massive voter data operation, i360, for the upcoming election. For the last five years i360 has been widely reported to be part of the tax-exempt group called Freedom Partners. That is now being called into question by these ads and documents we have tracked down at government archives. More about that in a moment, but first some necessary background.

There's a rubric in law enforcement that if you want to find the perpetrator of a crime, you ask yourself this – who benefits. Cambridge Analytica, the voter database that harvested millions of Facebook users' profiles without their permission and helped the Donald Trump campaign to victory in the 2016 presidential election is now bankrupt and under Federal investigation. Its financial backer, hedge fund billionaire Robert Mercer, has benefitted little in terms of packing the Trump administration with his own minions.

Wikipedia cite:

{{cite news | first = Pam | last = Martens | title = Koch Industries Is Staffing Up with Voter Data Scientists to Tip the November Election to the Extreme Right | url = https://www.counterpunch.org/2018/07/23/koch-industries-is-staffing-up-with-voter-data-scientists-to-tip-the-november-election-to-the-extreme-right/ | work = CounterPunch | date = July 23, 2018 | accessdate = April 14, 2022 }}