GOTV: Past, Present & Future

Promoted and bumped. -Patrick

I've been involved with many facets of many different types of campaigns: local school board, city council, state legislature, statewide gubernatorial, congressional, ballot initiative, and in-state presidential organizations. When I occassionally speak at campaign management and organization seminars, I am often asked the question: what is the most important part of the campaign? That question is so hard to answer because (1) campaigns are short-term "fire-fighting" operations as much as they are long-term strategic organziations, and (2) each part of the campaign (or at least a good campaign) is interconnected.

Yes, most of the money that gets spent is on paid media, and some will say that because of this, fundraising is the most important facet. While I don't disagree, something that I focus a lot of my attention on is GOTV efforts, a low-cost and high-importance category that has to be planned from the very beginning of the campaign but is executed in the last 72 hours.

So here are a few items of interest that all deal with GOTV efforts:

PAST:

The New York Times wrote an editorial on badly designed ballots from the 2000 election, and how that lesson has not been learned. They not only point to the famous Palm Beach County butterfly ballot; they criticize the "full-face ballot" law in New York that "requires every race to be listed on a single screen or piece of paper." The NYT claims and advocates:

"Voters skip races in which they wanted to vote, or they mark their ballots in ways that cause their votes not to be counted. As the Brennan Center report notes, poor, minority, elderly and disabled voters are disproportionately likely to have their votes thrown out."

"Congress should require that ballots used in federal elections meet minimum design standards. It should also mandate pre-election usability testing and make funds available for it. States and localities need to draw up better guidelines for how ballots are designed and clearer instructions to voters. They should also publicly report after each election how many votes are lost because of miscast ballots."

While I'm not sure that ballot design has that significant of an effect on voter turnout, I do believe that ballots should be as simple as possible for the voter that shows up at the polls on election day; and the idea of publicly available and detailed reports of miscast ballots is great. I'm not sure that Congress should get involved, but the electoral process is only one of many things we should focus on when it comes to government transparency at the state and county levels.

What have been your "ballot box experiences" in different states and counties? And what might the best ballot look like?

PRESENT:

Robert Novak wrote an interesting piece on a resolution submitted by Roy Blunt "demanding that the Defense Department better enable U.S. military personnel overseas to vote in the November elections." And what has the Democratic leadership done? Nothing. Apparently, "analysis by the federal Election Assistance Commission, rejecting inflated Defense Department voting claims, estimated overseas and absentee military voting for the 2006 midterm elections at a disgracefully low 5.5 percent."

While no solutions have been offered by Novak, he mentions that Democrats might not be so excited to help out in this effort because of the fear that more soliders voting means more votes for Republicans. Not all hope is lost because at least one leading Democrat is willing to give members of our armed forces easier access to ballots:

"Nevertheless, at least one prominent Democrat -- House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer -- described himself to me as eager to deal with this problem. (Hoyer's home state of Maryland is one of the worst offenders, with ballots of only 4.1 percent of overseas voters counted in 2006.) Hoyer and Blunt, who have become friendly adversaries in a bitterly partisan Congress, conferred several weeks ago and agreed in principle on co-sponsoring a resolution aimed at getting the Defense Department moving."

"One presidential staffer who is familiar with the situation privately dismisses the Pentagon bureaucrats as "hopeless." In a lame-duck administration counting the days before a troubled eight years finally end, American fighting men and women in Iraq and Afghanistan deprived of their right to vote constitute the least of White House worries."

5.5% is pretty dismal. Yes, the Pentagon obviously needs to get involved, but are there any solutions that state and county elections commissioners can implement to help those who protect our right to vote safely in the comfort of our own precincts?

FUTURE:

Facebook is apparently putting it's fingers into other web spaces. Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook, announced a new facet of their platform:

"To carve out a piece of that future, the company announced Facebook Connect, a way that other Web sites can integrate parts of Facebook's service. Web sites can ask users for their Facebook user name and password, instead of creating an identity verification system themselves, and offer their users the ability to import their list of friends from Facebook."

"For example, the mobile service company Loopt, based in Mountain View, California, helps people find their friends and see what they are doing on a map on their mobile phone. It will use Facebook Connect so its users do not have to re-enter their connections to the friends they want to track."

I've talked about the ups and downs of microtargeting, and so has Soren. But the next generation of social networking and social media spaces on the Web give potential to new tools that parties and other organizations case use to not only communicate with voters, but to identify them.

Any good GOTV program has tethered to it a long term voter ID program that can generate a "universe of supporters" that can be contacted during execution of GOTV. Soren talked about this in his last post. Right now it seems like Web 2.0 tools are still only a footnote of campaign strategy. I look forward to the day when those tools are essential for campaign management. The question is this: will it be a matter of time or a matter of creativity? Does our generation, and the next generation, just need to push out the old style of campaigning over the next decade or will someone come up with a platform or set of platforms that will revolutionize the 2010 cycle?

Thoughts please!