People are well aware that one of the keys to Obama's nomination was the combination of grass roots activism combined with the high tech tools built around the Obama web site. These tools gave people the ability to connect, create events, and make calls to potential voters in upcoming primary states, all with the click of a button.
Now that we are into the General Election, one of the keys to victory is the ability to register new voters. One amazing study done in this regard is located here. With a massive enough outreach to new voters, even Texas becomes a swing state! Toward this end, the Obama campaign began a 50 state voter registration drive in April.
The basic concept of finding unregistered voters is simple: you get a large list of people in the area you want to target and a list of people who are already registered to vote in that area, and you compare the two. Doing this can be difficult in practice, but assuming the unregistered names have been identified, then some of the same tools that were used to contact potential primary voters can come into play. Click on a congressional district in Georgia and get a list of say, 20 names for calling, letter writing, or local outreach. Those of you who made calls to potential voters from the lists on the Obama web site are familiar with the concept. Imagine if millions of Obama supporters had the ability to do this for voter registration as well?
To my knowledge, no one has ever fused a voter registration drive with Web 2.0 in such a way before. Possibly the Obama campaign is working on something similar, if it is possible and the logistics aren't too daunting. If not, hopefully someone will read this and move the concept along, or even begin to build such tools.
Comments are closed for this post.
