Bringing the Crowd to Vote

Political crowdsourcing implies the act of taking a task traditionally performed by politicos, and outsourcing it to large group of voters. An article from Tech President, outlines what a powerful web-based tool set would look like to perform such tasks.

A social networking tool allows supporters to self-organize. The tool allows finding and connecting with others, blog, manage email lists, set up events, and allow person to person fundraising.

The second component involves turning that self-organized volunteer energy into a field program, thereby turning volunteer energy into votes with a web-based distributable voter file system.

Joe Trippi notes in the latest Rolling Stone about the Obama campaign;

"They have taken the bottom-up campaign and absolutely perfected it. They'll have 100,000 people in a state who have signed up on their Web site and put in their zip code. Now, paid organizers can get in touch with people at the precinct level and help them build the organization bottom up. That's never happened before. It never was possible before."

The Obama campaign posted the event its social-networking site and e-mailed local residents who had donated to the campaign or offered addresses as the price of admission to a rally. The volunteers will then be able to call their own shots, from organizing local rallies to recruiting and training a crew of fellow supporters to man their precincts on election day.

To identify and mobilize backers, they download the phone numbers of targeted voters to make calls from their homes and upload the results to headquarters, while also organize early-voting open houses to boost turnout among core supporters.

Obama deputy campaign manager Steve Hildebrand notes;

"We didn't make the assumption that people signing up on our Web site meant that they were going to help the candidate or even vote for him. From the beginning, we had an initiative to take our online force offline."

"Events are not just an opportunity for us to put Barack in front of voters," says Hildebrand. "It's a chance for voters to be in a captive environment where we ask them to sign up and do more for Barack — to make phone calls, canvas, get out the vote. We don't want people to just come to an event — we want them to become part of this movement."

* This article is reproduced on my blog, PUTSCH