Software Today Makes GOTV Exciting
Sun Jan 27, 2008 at 10:39:06 AM PDT
I'll admit it. I'm a numbers junkie. My background was marketing analysis and some health care analysis and I've always been a computer nerd. I remember the excitement of trying to solve physics problems on a teletype tie in to the Darthmouth mainframe computer and buying my first Apple II computer in the 70's.
Naturally, upon moving to Florida and having way too much free time on my hands, getting immersed in politics was a natural outlet. And for someone like me, Florida is a great place to be.
First we have Florida Sunshine act which requires almost everything to be open to the public. Second, we are pretty technologically saavy down here and both state and local governments do a great job of making this information readily available, either through the internet or by providing data files.
For example, voter information is public record and the state Division of Elections makes complete voter files available on CD at nominal costs. Also, if you're representing certain approved groups (candidates, political committees, etc) you can even get daily access to absentee voter requests and the status of those requests.
Property data files are readily available through our county property assessors, making matching voters to homeowners and interesting exercise.
But what I want to share today are some of the things you can do with mapping software, once you've built databases for whatever GOTV purpose you need.
In the old days, walk lists were always a challenge. Sure you could sort them by address and the always popular even/odd technique and then arm your candidate or volunteers with street maps, but you'd always end up with someone wandering around a neighborhood totally lost. Today, with products like Microsoft's MapPoint or ESRI BusinessMap, for a very small cost you now have access to software that will let you import voter files and produce maps in walking order. Even the most geographicall challenged candidate can now get out there and pound the pavement.
But what really hit home for me this past week was working on a project to help send hundreds of volunteers out into the field on January 29 during Florida's presidential primary. We are facing an effort to place the so-called "Defense of Marriage" constitutional amendment on the November ballot, which will prohibit in our constitution anything that attempts to mimic opposite sex marriage; same-sex marriage, civil unions, common law arrangements and perhaps even contracts between same sex individuals.
Because of the ineptitude of the backers of the amendment, they found themselves 20,000 petitions short, facing a February 1 deadline. (Apparently they were unable to keep track of the number of petitions they submitted and relied upon numbers from the state Division of Elections, which told them in early January they had over 618,000 petitions, exceeding the 611,000 needed. Unfortunately, it was discovered that there had been errors in the numbers being reported by some of the counties and when the DOE completed a recount a couple of weeks ago, they were suddently sitting at 588,000 petitions.)
So we are expecting they are going to make an effort to secure those needed petitions at polling places on January 29 and we have to face the possibility that they will get certified and it will be on the Novemember ballot. (You can read more about this here).
So the need was to place literally hundreds of volunteers at strategic polling places throughout the state, encouraging people to "decline to sign" in areas where there was petition activity or to identify opponents of the measure who could be counted on to work with us if it gets on the ballot.
Since the county supervisors are required to identify each voter who has signed a petition, we have been able to far to identify approximately 450,000 of these voters (it does take a little work here, as you have to deal with 67 separate county elections supervisors - about half can provide data files, about have PDF's - from which the voter ID's can be extracted.)
Taking that information, we've been able to identify precincts where petition support was strongest and in many cases accumulate that information by polling place so that we could identify which specific polling places would be likely to see petition activity. That data could then be sorted by the most likely polling places and made available to organizers in specific areas.
The largest group of volunteers, however, were going to be used to help identify voters on our side and we wanted to place to volunteers in more friendly precincts. Using several data sources, voter file information, census same-sex demographics and other census demographics, we could then identify precincts (approximately 300 throughout Florida) that we felt would be more receptive to our message.
But matching up hundreds of volunteers to precincts can be very time consuming. Fortunately today, mapping software (such as Manifold, an inexpensive software package) can help simplify much of this process. Although not 100% current, we have access to precinct mapping files so that we can plot each of Florida's precincts and then tie this information to our target data. This allows us to color code the precincts and present a visual display for each of our geographic areas.
Volunteers can then be plotted on the same maps, using their home address.To provide additional information, the mapping software can be used to list the local precinct for each volunteer's address (saving having to actually look up their voting precinct - not 100% accurate, but very close) and also the closest target precinct to their address. Between the maps produced and these listings, it's much easier for a local coordinator to figure out where to send their volunteers.
For my part, I was producing and sending PDF's here there and everywhere, for almost 20 areas in the state. (Yes, Florida is a big state - 10 million voters, 7000 precincts.) But I love exercises like this, as it helps me refine my techinques for voter identification and then mapping that information for use by the people out in the field. For groups like the ones I usually work with, that don't have access to limiteless budgets and expensive consultants, I like to think that it helps even out the playing field a little bit.
I'm looking forward to getting feedback from this latest effort so that we can then begin to build upon it for our efforts in the August primary and the ultimate, the Novemember general election.
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