This past midterm I volunteered with one of our new netroots challengers. I spent a LOT of time working data entry. Lots of people with clipboards wandering around in a strange land. Lots of volunteer hours 10-keying results into the computer. Lots of GOTV ninja waiting for data to arrive before planning the next move.
The Apple iPhone changes this completely.
Find out how after the jump.
This is the way we do voter ID and GOTV as far as I can tell having done some of the grunt work:
- walk lists are printed out from a web application
- list is walked or banked and data is collected
- finished lists are handed to volunteers, who enter the data
- Late that night, strategists make sense of the data and available volunteer levels and plan the next days lists
- Wash, rinse, repeat, gotv, pray
This is how I can see this changing:
- Lists are generated
- volunteer wakes up, logs into their campaign account
- volunteer is presented with a set of available lists to work and picks one
- the list comes up with a satellite/map google maps hybrid and directions from their location
- when in the precinct, volunteer touches the next house on their map. They get voter names, the form they're filling out and a custom script for that voter if there is one (think voter vault)
- After visiting the home volunteer fills out form and hits submit
- results are available instantly to hq
- after precinct is walked, phone goes into predictive dialer mode if volunteer chooses to call and HQ desires it. Not homes or inacessables are called on speakerphone with voter information on display. Forms filled out just like walking.
- when done, volunteer logs out of precinct. Unfinished contacts can be reassigned dynamically as other volunteers log in.
- campaign ninja plans tomorrow right after dinner
How have we made the campaign more effective:
- we have drastically if not completely eliminated the amount of volunteer hours needed for voter intelligence data entry
- we have made life much easier on volunteers by requiring them to only travel to precincts, rather than to hq, precincts, hq then home. In so doing, we get more hours out of them per day they volunteer.
- We have removed the latency between information gathering and useful data for strategists
- we have reduced the number of computers and office space needed for a campaign, saving costs
- we have saved volunteers from being lost with accurate and up to date maps
Now, I've only used VAN. I don't know how other systems work. And some of this is really fancypants. This could be done simply by allowing per-volunteer logins to the web app and allowing volunteers to choose a precinct from there.
There are gotchas: we're depending on deep market penetration of the devices. There will invariably be a mix of volunteers canvassing with phones and clipboards. But as these technologies become more ubiquitous, we'll see the abilities of campaigns to turn on a dime, on the cheap increase.
As a side note. The iPhone has a 2 megapixel camera, a fast internet connection and a real web browser. This means one thing: Macaca incident is youtubed instantly. Imagine that. Allen's campaign tanking before he was even done giving that speech.