Congratulations! You're about to get access to the VAN, the greatest tool for generating and tracking person-to-person voter contact ever created. Your campaign or organization is helping to rebuild our democracy on a distributed, networked and participatory foundation, and helping our democratic system finally transition away from the broadcast, top-down and big-money system that has been in place since the 1960s.

1st Generation: Basic online voter files.

2nd Generation: Distributed voter files: tools that were easy enough to 

3rd Generation: Integration: 


Data Details

We build our file from 25-30 counties use the Sec. of State file for the rest of the state. The process is that we order from the counties and the Sec. State at the same time, cross-test between the two to make sure things line up (lately this has gotten a lot better), pull out email and PAV status from the county files, put the whole thing together and then ship it to a commercial vendor (TargetSmart) for NCOA and a couple other hygiene steps, geocoding and some basic phone improvement, then they ship it to VAN. We'll do this baseline update twice this year, around April and September. Due to some technical limitations in how the VAN is built, we have to update the whole state at once (at least for now, this may change soon) - the upside is that it's very fast; pulling out a quick precinct list anywhere in the state should take less than 5 seconds, and most queries take under 30 seconds.

Because of the design decisions like this that VAN has made, the underlying voter file data is constantly being collaboratively updated by all the campaigns and organizations using the system (we had over 120 using it in 2008 and are on track for something like that this year). Deceased and bad address coding is sticky between updates, which (from what I understand and have experienced) is quite different from some of the other systems commonly used in CA. In national testing for OFA in the field, VAN has found this collaborative hygiene to be key to providing the absolute highest quality data possible.

Since our phones are based on the voter file and not commercial data, their accuracy is a little limited, but you can order phone upgrades from TargetSmart for $10-15 per thousand records; we've found their $10 level to be excellent. You can get Already Voted data from the counties and upload it very quickly into the VAN. If you want to create a new registrants VAN committee for any campaign, i.e with data after the county 15 day close, we can set that up for you and walk you through a pretty straightforward process of loading it.

Commercial Data (phones, ethnicity etc)

To keep the system as affordable as possible for small-budget organizations, we don't purchase commercial phone number enhancements. However we can load them very easily from a vendor of your choice, or we've had excellent luck working with TargetSmart for phone upgrades as well as commercial ethnicity data. Prices for both start at around $10/1000.

Matching

If you have data that hasn't been matched to the voter file, many campaigns and organizations try to match that to the voter file.

Best Practices for New Registrants

One of the design decisions that the VAN has made is that they have traded off everyday speed for the ability to easily update the baseline voter data. In general this is a great decision, because it enables both live-updating and distributed field campaigns that scale all the way up from the neighborhood to the 17 million (and climbing!) voters in California. We strongly recommend that you focus on the fundamentals: recruit lots of volunteers, train them well, and contact all the voters in the system. Always send neighborhood teams out with registration forms, and make sure you keep copies of the reg forms to use as a separate call universe. Even better: get neighborhood teams to send out postcards thanking people for registering, especially if they register as a Dem.

However, you may also want to include new registrant universes as part of your campaign plan, especially in areas of high turnover. To do this, send us a request via email for a new registrants committee. We'll set it up, then follow the instructions below.


Setting up a New Registrants Committee

You will need: a database (Microsoft Access, mysql or postgres all work great), some basic skills in how to use it, and a fresh copy of a county voter file.

1. Take the current file from the county, import it into the database, then pull out the county voter ID, first name and last name columns and export them as a plain text (CSV or tab delimited) file.

2. Bulk upload that file to the My Voter File side. When the VAN asks if you want to export unmatched records, say yes, then go back to the main menu.

3. Once it's done processing (if it isn't instant it's usually only a few minutes), get the export file. You now have a list of all the new registrants that weren't found in the VAN. Download this file and save it.

4. Go back to your database, import this file, and match it to the original file. I.e if the original voter roll table was called "VRollSomeCounty" and the new reg export from the VAN is loaded as "NewRegSomeCounty", and you created a column in VRollSomeCounty called "newreg" as a boolean, this would work:

update VRollSomeCounty set newreg=True where VRollSomeCounty.CountyVoterID = NewRegSomeCounty.CountyVoterID

5. Now export the new registrant records, just including the name, voting or mailing address, phone number, email, party, PAV status etc. You're loading this into MyCampaign so can only pick one address.

6. Create a PAV activist code in your MyCamp if you don't already see one, then bulk upload the file into MyCampaign, and apply activist codes for party (if necessary) and PAV status.

7. (optional) Fill out a support request asking VAN to develop the ability to dynamically update baseline data so we don't have to keep doing this! (don't worry, this is on the schedule for the next cycle or two - and, the state will be deploying a new system that's going to make all this a lot easier as well)