[Odb-help] ODB use in electoral politics, voter registration

[Rich Cowan]

To ODB users and would-be users:

   In the next two weeks we are planning to add some
features to ODB to make it appropriate for a larger
variety of local political activities, including voter registration
drives and runs for local office (such as School Committee,
City Council, Board of Alderman, etc.).

   We are looking for feedback from people who are already
doing this or are considering doing it in the future.

   I should first make it clear that ODB often serves a different
function from other software programs out there that are
used in local political campaign organizing.  Typically, there
are two key lists in any local campaign:  the voter list (often
a list of ALL of the voters in the target district, even people
who are likely to vote for opposing candidates), and the
volunteer/donor/key supporter list (people you have contacted
face to face or people you have some "affinity" with, and
can target for invitations to events, etc.).  It is possible these
lists to be stored in a single software program, but given
the options out there, it might be best at this point to keep
the information in two separate databases.

   For example, in a local campaign in the town where I live,
a progressive candidate is using the ODB software to serve
the latter function.  So when his campaign manager lines up
someone to agree to host a house party, coordinate a precinct,
stuff envelopes, give $100, this information goes into ODB.
In a successful local campaign in a small city at the Ward level
or in a medium-sized town, you might end up with 150
people signed up to put signs in their yard, 20 people signed up
to mount a roof sign on their car, 100 people signed up to appear
with signs at various hours at a busy intersection as part
of a standouts, 50 people signed up to "drop literature", etc.  My
sense is that ODB is already extremely well suited to this
volunteer management task, though we are open to suggestions
for improvements in this area.

   The other important component of a good campaign is a
canvass operation, which can be by phone or by doorknocking.
In this sort of campaign you would put the ENTIRE list of residents
of your town or district into your database.  The campaign I
mentioned above us using an Excel spreadsheet for this purpose;
I have seen a few consultants using ODB for this (one campaign
imported 60,000 people).  However, we still need to make enhancements
to ODB to make it easier to bring in an entire voter list.  (For one thing,
it is faster to import data into Access or Excel or dBase than it is to
import the data into ODB, Filemaker, or eBase).

   Assuming that we could make changes

   Here are the changes we are thinking about:

1) there should be a date of birth field; this is needed to
      import voting lists.
2) party affiliation is now 1 character, and in some states
     2 characters might be required.
3) there is a "gender" field in ODB, for future use, but there
     is no way as of yet to access it.
4) the "voter reg" field is a checkbox, but it might actually
     need to be a letter, so that four possibilities can be
    represented:   Never registered and eligible to register to
    vote/ Never registered, not eligible/ Previously registered,
    but now Inactive/ Registered, active
5) we willl add a printing option to make it easier to generate
     the kinds of printouts that someone working at the polls might
     want.  Already we can sort by street name, but the printout
     might include a blank space where you can check off
     a voter as having voted, which is what local campaigns will
     do as part of a "turnout" operation.  During the day, your goal
     is to get the people who promised to vote for your candidate
     to the polls, and knowing who already voted enables you to
     focus your last minute phoning and doorknocking on those
     people who haven't voted yet.
6) We will add special import options that are designed to
     speed the importing of voter data.

Are we missing anything?  Please respond by Thursday
morning.  Thanks!  Note that any changes which will require
people to update existing ODB databases are likely to
be deferred until version 1.0.

-rich cowan