With the 2008 elections heating up, the press is taking notice of the leading technology providers. Aristotle, the market leader in political technology and identity verification, was featured in today's Vanity Fair as a web-exclusive:

Excerpts from the article include: 

The Right Data - the Winner's Weapon of Choice

"Aristotle’s massive private database contains detailed information about roughly 175 million American voters. “It’s not that [Aristotle’s] list is good—they’re considered to have the only list,” says Richard Viguerie... “Aristotle is the premier company in that area. If you want to get into demographics, I don’t know that they even have a competitor.”

Breakthrough Technology Shapes Politics 

"Phillips is in the business of political data mining ... and the tool he’s demonstrating for me could be seen as a breakthrough in electoral politics ... it’s called Aristotle 360. The best way to think of it is as a hal2000 for running campaigns."

"Phillips hits a button and up pops Smith’s basic information—address, phone number, etc. A click of the mouse brings more personal information—his photograph, his age and occupation, the names of his adult family members, his party affiliation and approximate income. Another click summons the exact amounts of political donations he has made. Phillips clicks once more, and a kind of molecular model appears on-screen, showing every political donor and potentially influential person Smith is linked to, in Atlanta and beyond, with dozens of interlocking nodes. Each node leads to the profile of another voter, about whom Aristotle knows just as much or more."

Empowering Grassroots Democracy 

"John Jameson, president of the Democratic campaign consultancy Winning Connections, recounted a similar story to me. It was five p.m. on Election Day in Los Angeles in 2001, and the exit polls were not indicating a sure win for Jameson’s client, mayoral candidate James Hahn. Jameson called Aristotle and put in an immediate order for its list of Los Angeles Democrats. Jameson downloaded the list within seconds and turned out an extra 20,000 to 30,000 voters, by his estimate, to pull levers for Hahn. He beat his opponent by a margin of 7 percent. “Campaigns are like one-day sales,” Phillips says. “You have to get all the shoppers in the store on one day.”

Champion of Transparent Democracy Worldwide

"In late 2004, Phillips helped presidential candidate Viktor Yushchenko expose the vote fraud being perpetrated by his Kremlin-backed opponent, Viktor Yanukovich. Working out of a media war room he set up in Yushchenko’s Kiev headquarters, Phillips used state-of-the-art vote-monitoring technology to identify where the falsified returns were coming from and dispatched news crews and volunteers armed with cell-phone cameras to the hot spots."

"According to Galaychuk, whose candidate was poisoned and nearly killed during the race, Phillips was in danger the entire time, too. He moved around disguised as a local reporter, dressed in Ukrainian clothing, flashing a press pass. “There were constant threats of physical punishment,” Galaychuk says."

To read more, visit VanityFair.com for the full article.