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Making Voter Contact Data and Systems in California Elections Personal and Progressive
"The first lesson of politics is learning to count."
–Apocryphal
In 2002, I went from being a spectator of the political process in this state to being an active participant. I was lucky to get involved at the time with a crew that believed that neighbor to neighbor conversations were one of the cornerstones of democracy, and because of this belief, they focused their campaign efforts very intensely on generating lots of personal contacts. This was great, but coming from the technology industry I was a little surprised at the state of the data tools we had to support this effort. There were no web interfaces, no way to share contacts and collaborate with other campaigns or organizations, and not even an easy, secure way to keep the data around from one campaign cycle to the next.
Four years later, this cluster of problems is well on its way to being fixed. After a couple rounds of proposal writing, California VoterConnect got started in August of last year. We assembled a voter file database for the entire state, got a system for accessing it up and running, signed up 25 active partners and generated tens of thousands of voter contact IDs in just two months….
Read more on the California Progress Report