AdvoKit - Person To Person Politics:

AdvoKit is a Voter ID/GOTV Web application available for free to any organization doing community organizing. The Howard Dean presidential campaign demonstrated that significant political power can result when an online community grows and unites behind a cause. The 2004 Democratic primary proved that people can trump "big" money in our civic lives. In our system of government, at the end of the day, the only thing that matters is winning an election. AdvoKit provides the tools to get people out to vote.

Voter ID/GOTV campaigns, when effectively organized, can easily produce a margin of victory for a contested election. The Web, with its ability to facilitate efficient collaboration among large numbers of people, enables, for the first time, volunteer recruitment and Voter ID/GOTV to be performed by thousands, or even tens of thousands of individual political supporters. However, well designed and inexpensive Web tools for managing such an effort have not been available.

AdvoKit

combines manage­ment and tools for the best practices of traditional Voter ID/GOTV campaigning with the power of social networks and friend-to-friend outreach methodology to produce a campaign system with unprecedented political power, that costs almost nothing, and strengthens civil society - indeed, relies on it. Friend to friend outreach has been shown to be five to ten times more effective at identifying supporters, per contact, than targeted phone banking, and twice as effective as neighbor to neighbor outreach. The secret to AdvoKit is its ability to recruit, manage and effectively utilize large numbers of volunteers - all performing high-yield friend to friend outreach within their communities.

Even as we've been working to tie down loose ends for the upcoming 1.0 release, I've been playing around with integrating some of David Donachie's awsome improvements for post-1.0 Advokit. I managed to get his "prefiltering" scheme working pretty nicely. Prefiltering adds a new "prefilter" table, plus some fields to the team and teamjob tables, so it's not "1.0 compatible". It works by creating a list of all voter ids that match each unique combination of voter filters.

It has been about a year and a half since the most recent "official" release of AdvoKit - 0.9.9 - was tagged and announced. Frankly, I had largely given up hope of seeing any further development. The original development team had largely disbanded and were pursuing other interests, myself included.

A tale of three campaigns

In 1980, a citizen petition was passed under the initiative and referendum law restricting the ability of towns in Massachusetts to increase property tax rates. In the almost quarter-century since then, every Massachusetts town has been cutting back on expenditures for schools, roads and community services in order to keep under the 2.5% limitation, while also struggling to satisfy steadily increasing state and federal spending mandates. Proposition 2.5 allows communities to override its provisions by a majority vote in an election. This has spawned a minor political industry in Massachusetts – the override campaign. In 2003, more than 70 towns in Massachusetts attempted overrides. Williamstown, Massachusetts, attempted several overrides during the 1990’s, most of which failed. The first significant success (to raise more than a few tens of thousands of dollars) happened in 1998 when a citizens group was organized to mount a supporter identification/get out the vote drive. Overrides in 1999 and 2003 also passed, helped again by the efforts of organized citizen groups. Given the repeated early failures, it iis clear that without the organized campaigns, the three successful overrides would not have passed.

The three successful overrides were similar in their size (all in the range of $500,000-$600,000), and all were supported by organized citizen campaigns. However, the differences between them are quite interesting to study.

Valdis Krebs wrote an article on the connection between social interaction and political choice. It provides a compelling argument for the value of political outreach driven through the web of personal relationships among friends, neighbors and acquaintances.

This is precisely the kind of scenario that AdvoKit is designed to facilitate!

Read the article here

A tale of three campaigns

In 1980, a citizen petition was passed under the initiative and referendum law restricting the ability of towns in Massachusetts to increase property tax rates. In the almost quarter-century since then, every Massachusetts town has been cutting back on expenditures for schools, roads and community services in order to keep under the 2.5% limitation, while also struggling to satisfy steadily increasing state and federal spending mandates. Proposition 2.5 allows communities to override its provisions by a majority vote in an election. This has spawned a minor political industry in Massachusetts – the override campaign. In 2003, more than 70 towns in Massachusetts attempted overrides. Williamstown, Massachusetts, attempted several overrides during the 1990’s, most of which failed. The first significant success (to raise more than a few tens of thousands of dollars) happened in 1998 when a citizens group was organized to mount a supporter identification/get out the vote drive. Overrides in 1999 and 2003 also passed, helped again by the efforts of organized citizen groups. Given the repeated early failures, it iis clear that without the organized campaigns, the three successful overrides would not have passed.

The three successful overrides were similar in their size (all in the range of $500,000-$600,000), and all were supported by organized citizen campaigns. However, the differences between them are quite interesting to study.