Mining electoral data for effective campaigns and e-participation: A case study in Venezuela

E-Democracy and E-Participation are sub-areas of E-Government that utilize Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) to empower democracy and allow the participation of ordinary people during the definition of policies that affect their lives. Particularly, general elections as well as the selection of presidential candidates are types of electoral events where ICT can facilitate the constituency participation, providing a resource to influence the implementation of such events. The authors propose data mining and ranking techniques to analyze voting historical data and identify regions where electoral campaigns need to be intensified. Based on citizens' participation patterns in previous elections, they illustrate the quality of their approach on Venezuelan electoral data and compare it with respect to the results produced by a baseline independent study. Experimental results suggest that the authors' techniques are able to predict the classification given for the baseline study, while they are simpler and easily reproducible.