Linda Fenech lives in the hyper-marginal seat of Macquarie in Sydney's west, which is held by Labor by just 371 votes.
She regularly writes, calls and visits her local representatives as well as answers political robocalls.
As a mother of a child living with a disability, this lifelong Liberal voter says she is switching to Labor for the first time this election.
She's what political data-crunchers would call a "persuadable", a voter who could be nudged to swap sides.
With such a fine margin between success and failure, it's people like Linda whom both parties are targeting with increasingly sophisticated messaging in a bid to win them over.
And it's underpinned by a data-driven approach helping to transform stacks of data points harvested from the voting public to identify swing voters in key electorates.
The software being used to influence your vote
Labor's voter database is called "Campaign Central". In it, constituents are assigned a "persuadability score" based on information collected through polling and robocall results.
Data analysts then parse these results against the respondent's key demographic information such as income, age and gender to produce statistical modelling which tells Labor strategists if you're worth their time and effort.
University of Queensland's (UQ) Glenn Kefford, who spent years researching both databases, says identifying voters as "moderately" or "highly persuadable" helps with campaigning.
"When they segment the voters up for targeting in phone banking, for example, the lists are really segmented along who's most persuadable," he said.
If you have a higher persuadability score, you're more likely to receive phone calls or door knocks from volunteers or to have direct mail about specific issues the party knows you care about (based on what their software has on you) dropped into your letterbox.
Former Labor MP Emma Husar said scores were used to identify how the party could sway a voter on a particular issue.
"If they had a higher persuadability score you would find out what they are persuadable on … so health, education, defence … then you would tailor the messages to them, so it could be more calls from the MP … [or] bombard them with direct mail."
According to one former Labor insider, persuadability scores could even help identify which members within a family group were more likely to respond to inducement.
"I could [see] the persuasion scores of people enrolled at an address, so I can walk to a family house of five and know I want to talk to only two people there, because I know for example the kids are persuadable and the mother and father have an entrenched voting pattern."
The Liberals have a similar but older system called "Feedback". Liberal campaign strategists concede that Labor's set-up is years ahead of theirs.
The software may also help a party determine if it's worth courting your vote at all. If Labor campaigners identified you as a rusted-on Liberal, they would avoid hassling you.
For Liberals, this kind of information may be determined through their position on defence and national security.
"Internally, we knew voters who rated defence and national security as a very important issue were likely to vote Liberal," a current Liberal strategist said.
"Because of this, we wouldn't bother sending them any campaign materials because we knew we had their vote anyway."
Labor sources said similar conclusions could be drawn about their voters based on their recorded stances on healthcare and education.
How did the parties get this information about you?
If you're registered to vote in Australia, you already exist in both the Liberal's Feedback and Labor Campaign Central and there is no way to know what the parties have about you.
Political parties have been exempt from the Privacy Act since 2000. If a voter demanded access to their profiles, there is no legal obligation on the parties' parts to show or remove the data if requested.
"Australia is one of the only advanced democracies where parties are completely exempt from privacy legislation," Dr Kefford said.
Both programs are loaded with voter details supplied by the Australian Electoral Commission (AEC), which includes names, age and address.
Sources familiar with the software said the programs have extracted contact information from the electoral roll if voters voluntarily made it available.
Otherwise, parties may fill in gaps in contact details through external providers or other means such as scanning details filled out a party-affiliated postal vote registration forms.
The AEC said it does not provide voter's phone numbers and email addresses to parties.
This personal information, initially intended to help politicians work with their constituents, forms the foundation of a data arms race between the two parties, who use it to build detailed pictures about their voters.
Every time you engage with your local representative's office, the nature of your interaction can also be added as a point of data to your profile.
Insiders say this could be through paper surveys sent to you about the cost of living, responding to prompts on a robocall about voting intentions, or answering a doorknock from volunteers.
Party staffers wouldn't even need to leave their desks.
"If you ever called your MP and complained about a specific issue, say about climate change or same-sex marriage, the person on the other side of the phone could look you up and add your thoughts in there," a current Liberal strategist said.
The final result in their databases is a robust breakdown of your viewpoints.
This information would also follow you if you moved to another electorate and you would appear in a report for your new representative, which would be generated once you changed your registered address with the AEC.
Ms Fenech, 43, in the seat of Macquarie, grew up in a Liberal-voting household and has supported the incumbent party for most of her life.
As a mother of a child living with cerebral palsy, Ms Fenech researched the disability support policies of the major parties and has become a vocal supporter of Labor's Susan Templeman.
Ms Fenech told the ABC that after she made it public she was switching her vote, she saw an increase in Liberal Party campaign material in her letterbox.
"What I found a bit crazy is after I was so vocal, we got a lot of propaganda in our mailbox, some addressed to me directly and some just junk mail, almost all of it was Liberal [material].
"I had one pamphlet that was geared toward NDIS, a lot of it had to do with the Liberal policies on what they had done with the NDIS."
A former Liberal strategist told the ABC the team in Macquarie, historically a marginal electorate, had far more comprehensive profiles on voters than neighbouring safe seats.
The strategist said the campaign team would have seen her as someone worth engaging with given the seat is held by a margin of just 0.2 per cent.
"Unless they [Liberals] had a reason not to contact her, like if she had been very abusive during her interactions, they definitely would have tried to do something about her switch," they said.
Current and former Liberal strategists said Feedback was a centrepiece of several victories in key battlegrounds.
The software was launched before John Howard's campaign in 1996. It was at the time considered cutting-edge technology and one of the most sophisticated privately-created voter databases in Australia, if not the world.
After Republican strategist Karl Rove pioneered his infamous "metrics" system which helped George W Bush win the 2004 US presidential election through microtargeting, party faithful recognised the value of their software beyond sending out personalised mailouts.
A former Liberal strategist who worked in previous campaigns in marginal seats said the archives of data they kept in Feedback allowed the party to conduct surgical strikes in tight races.
Reports generated from Feedback would tell strategists at the start of a campaign who would be willing to put up corflutes, attend rallies or distribute flyers for the candidate.
Labor's Campaign Central can also help generate a call list which would prioritise specific people higher up based on the back end of the database.
With limited resourcing, campaign teams on the ground would rely on their software to identify pressure points.
The current Liberal strategist said Feedback could help campaign teams determine, for instance, which local park a truck towing a party billboard should visit.
Another former strategist went one step further, saying if the database on potential swing voters was robust enough they could even nominate specific residences to target with the drive-by billboard.
This was particularly useful in rural areas, where there was less housing density across wider geographical areas.
But how granular a party can go with data has been the subject of much internal contention.
Dr Kefford questioned how effective "persuadability scores" were in practice.
"Even the data scientists themselves and data analysts raise questions about how accurate those figures often are," the political scientist said.
Yet, parties were collecting and maintaining "tonnes and tonnes of data".
"The major parties have hundreds of data points on most Australian voters," Dr Kefford said. "I guess the question is, how much of it is useful?"
One former Liberal strategist said big data, particularly consumer data, which the Liberal Party flirted with was akin to snake oil.
"We just couldn't see how the size of someone's underwear would help us win their vote," they said.
Name and shame to collect
Despite some internal reticence around data collection, insiders say that every MP is expected to chip in.
"Party whips could see before meetings the progress of each office and how many data points they were adding," a current Liberal Party staffer said.
"If they were falling behind, MPs and their staffers would be named and shamed."
Both Labor and Liberal declined interviews and did not respond to questions about their data management practices.
Macquarie MP Susan Templeman told the ABC she takes the privacy of individuals seriously and would not comment on conversations she's had with them.
Former Labor MP Emma Husar, who left the party in acrimony, said she was concerned at the time about the lack of restrictions and protocols on who could access voter data.
She said her staff and volunteers were able to access the software in their electorate without any formal privacy training.
"The amount of data that I had access to … and I wasn't given any specialist kind of privacy [training], you know what to do if you came across something that was a bit worrying or concerning," she said.
"The use, and the monitoring and the security of it is all right up in the air, and I would say the ethics of it as well."
Dr Kefford, in the course of his research into campaigning, also observed a lack of privacy protocols.
"Privacy was not a key focus of campaigns on the ground … There was no major emphasis for volunteers to have a clear understanding of privacy guidelines."
The ABC understands both parties have restrictions around access to their voter data software. MPs would only have access to their own constituents, while senators and party headquarters could see information from across the state.
There have been notable cases of former Labor party staffers misusing their access to the database.
Last year an IBAC inquiry into branch stacking heard that staffers for Victorian Labor MP Adem Somyurek had used another Labor MP's log-in details to access a broader pool of data in Campaign Central.
In 2017, former NSW Labor boss Jamie Clements was found guilty of unlawfully accessing enrolment information, after he asked a Labor staffer to search Campaign Central for a man's phone number and address intending to give the details to former union leader Derrick Belan.
Chairman of the Australian Privacy Foundation David Vaile says more transparency from the parties is needed.
"[Political parties] expect to be able to see everything they could possibly see about us and collate it," he said.
"But they don't accept the obligational return of them being totally transparent and revealing all their data sources, what fields they have, what sort of algorithmic comparisons they have been making, therefore, what sort of connections they may make.
"The fact that this is going on … it shines a light on the exemption that political parties have given themselves."
NOTE: The story has been updated to reflect the AEC's comments about contact information being provided to political parties.
