By performing each of the roles in a political campaign, I've been training myself to become a campaign manager. My goal is to write campaign management software and offer it to small progressive campaigns, either for free or as low cost as possible.

Tactics - Targeting

The Registrar of Voters in each county makes available to candidates two sets of data necessary for effective targeting: the voter roll and statements of the vote for previous elections. The voter roll gives contact information for all the people registered in the county, along with a history of which elections each person cast a ballot in. A statement of the vote gives the number of votes each candidate or proposition received for every precinct.

My program currently does some analysis of this data to prioritize voters, but the software is very much a work in progress at this point. We Greens have a lot of enthusiasm and work like crazy, but we're often beaten by candidates who put in less effort, yet work smarter. There is a great deal more to code, but I believe proper use of targeting capability can transform our campaigns.

Resources - Information Management

Each campaign produces 3 assets of vital importance to succeeding campaigns: a donor list, a volunteer list and a list of identified voters. If the Green Party is to win more than isolated campaigns where conditions are ideal, we need to build and maintain these resources. By combining lists from successful local campaigns, we can begin to win higher offices.

To make these records useful in the long term, we need to create them with that goal in mind. Previous campaigns have each kept records in their own way: different file formats or field schemas, lost records, even sheets of paper.

By creating software tools to manage the records, I hope to standardize them and impose some discipline. I won't let you put an email address in the phone number field, for example. A custom application should also evolve to precisely fulfill our needs, while becoming easier to use.

Logistics - Mailing

The postal service has a database of essentially every mailbox in the U.S. To get their discounted postage rates, you match your addresses against this database in a process called CASS certification. Normally, a campaign sends its address list to a mailhouse, which then performs the certification. By integrating CASS into the voter targeting and list creation process, my software generates more effective lists. Just one of the improvements is in handling the many errors in address lists and voter rolls. Sometimes CASS can correct the errors, but when it cannot, my software can choose to mail to another address without errors. This has an additional effect on householding. Quite often, you want to send only one letter to a family of voters living at the same address. Errors in the data complicate this more than you might assume. Our donations are precious, printing and postage expensive, so mailing efficiently becomes very important. With the right hardware, my software can even eliminate the need for costly mailhouses entirely!

Part of the mailing list generator.

Logistics - Phone banking

Part of the calling list generator.

Perhaps the most effective tool that the Green Party lacks is an online distributed phone bank. I'm better at native applications, so I'd like to find a partner for its web programming. In the mean time, I've started on the targeting and phone list generation. I'm focusing on robocall lists first. I much prefer other forms of communication, but autodialers are the cheapest and the fastest to implement during a busy campaign. We've used them to particularly good effect in conducting polls. As with mailing addresses, voter rolls and contact lists are loaded with erroneous phone numbers. Autodialers are very particular about the syntax of their data, and the FCC has very specific rules regulating recorded messages. In the same way that tax preparation software makes April 15 managable, campaign software can make navigable this minefield of potential mistakes.

Continuing Development

I have a long list of additional functionality that I'd like to add to my Village Green application, but even its foundation and the capabilities above are still in the early stages of development.

If you're a C++ or PHP developer, I'd sure like some help. Please send an email to !