This idea isn’t completely new, but it’s impressive in its scope. The Minnesota GOP has deployed WebVoter, a web-based precinct committee-person organizing system. We had a prototype of this in the Dean campaign, ready to roll once the primaries were done. (Ah, those were the days.) Little did we know that Dean would be done too…
In any event, this is absolutely the future of politics. Give motivated individuals the ability to play a part in the evangelization of the party; the party gets a dashboard view of voting trends, issue analysis and areas where more information/activity are needed.
Wonder when Illinois will figure this out?
Here’s how WebVoter works: If you’re part of the Republican Party’s already identified 60,000 core households, you have received in the mail your very own WebVoter user name and password.
Enter that information, and you are provided with a list of 25 names, some of whom you’re likely to recognize, and their addresses, which you’re sure to know. They are all in your neighborhood.
Those are names of voters not already known to the GOP to be either Republicans or Democrats. The public policy issue that gets them worked up is similarly not known. Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to discover the party and issue preferences of your neighbors, and report them to the GOP brain in cyberspace. [Minneapolis Star-Tribune]
I linked to your post and to the underlying story on my blog. One of my readers commented, "is there an open-source tool that could be configured to do this? it looks like the concept could be used for lots of kinds of organizing, not just votes."
ReplyDeleteDo you know the answer?