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Here is a pic of the precinct maps

I canvassed in Virginia for the last weekend through Election Day for Obama. I was and still am in the tank for Obama. And yes, I do plan to be at the Inauguration in DC in January.

So anyway, I was really excited to see how microtargeting was working out within the Obama campaign. The vaunted Catalist database was supposed to be the backend for everything that us canvassers were working on. I was in Falls Church, VA because it also contained a fairly significant population of Asian Americans. With myself being Filipino American and my wife being Vietnamese American and our friend being Chinese American, between the three of us we could cover a decent-sized portion of the Asian diasporic population that has settled in Northern Virginia.  We were kind of a East and Southeast Asian Mod Squad.

We were given a packet that contained a list of voters to canvas as well as printouts of Google Maps that showed the locations of all the houses we were to target. I understand that that’s pretty organized for most campaigns. We were also given pens, highlighters, and even Google Maps directions to the precinct we need to cover. There was very little left to chance.

When a voter isn’t around, you still have to leave something on their door

The voter lists were comprised of several dozen addresses in each precinct. Each address contained one or more voters. Those voters had their age and sex attached to them and whether or not they were sporadic Democratic voters or needed supplemental information or needed to be persuaded. I understand age and sex information being taken from existing public source of information but I was very impressed by the notion that the Democratic powers that be knew who to persuade or not. That said, we were to approach these voters and ask them whether they were going to vote for Obama and if not, who they were going to vote for. We would also try to persuade them or at least leave extra literature for them. Some of these folks we even encouraged to go do some early voting. This required manual entry that was, at times, fraught with difficulty. Imagine carrying campaign literature, a clipboard and these sheets while canvassing a hundred homes a day. It was somewhat inconvenient and bulky. Worse, when we entered data into these sheets, new voter lists would be generated the next day for the same precinct and it was as if our data entry was ignored. After a couple of days of walking a precinct, you really get a feel for the people and the pace of a neighborhood. You definitely don’t want to go back to a strong McCain supporter and try to get them to vote for Obama. You’re wasting your time when you could hit three or four houses instead.

That said, here are my thoughts on how to improve Democratic canvassing in the future. I think this would be a fairly easy project to carry out and test in December for the runoff in Georgia between Saxby Chambless and Jim Martin for the US Senate. There should be no more paper printouts of otherwise electronic voter lists. It would be fairly easy to turn a list into either an Excel spreadsheet that can be loaded on a Windows Mobile device or better  yet, to leave it web-based and customized for a Google Android or iPhone. That’s basically formatting a page for Webkit and calling it a day. This would also mean integration with a GPS so that the software can basically tell you where to go next. The amount of data being transmitted from server to mobile phone is trivial, data entry errors would be minimized and it would allow canvassers to move even faster. There’s a bit of a delay between an encounter with a voter and then deciding where to go next. The three of us ended up coming up with a system where one of us would coordinate the other two. Despite the loss of a third canvasser, this actually sped us up. That’s what this canvassing software would do. It would act like an air traffic controller for canvassers in the field. I would not at all be surprised to see this in 2012.