Increasingly the basic strategy of identifying your supporters and getting them to the polls has been augmented by internet smart phone technologies. Not so long ago campaigns identified supports two ways: (1) same-party voter registration rolls; and (2) canvassing voters by knocking on their doors or calling their telephones. Then on election day, political party poll watcher would cross of a voters name at the precinct vote station when he or she arrived to cast their ballot. Throughout the day party workers would collect these sheets, and campaign offices would call those supporters who had not yet voted to urge, remind, and in some cases, drive them down to the polls.
Cell phones complicated targeting voters since these numbers aren't in the public directories - however the proliferation of phones that access internet, email and Facebook have expanded the opportunities to reach like-minded supporters in several ways.
Facebook - It's not just about communicating. Pro Publica's Lois Beckett reported that users who signed up for Obama's Facebook application received notices about friends living in battleground states. With a touch of a finger, emails would be sent to urge those friends to register and vote.
Smart Technology needs to work. The National Republican Party took charge of their Get-out-the-vote (GOTV) campaign using a highly vaunted Project Orca. The name was a subtle jab at it's Obama counter-part Project Narwhal. Billed as a massive, technologically sophisticated poll monitoring program - it would be a secret weapon for Mitt Romney. Instead it was an unmitigated disaster according to Ace of Spades:
For starters, this was billed as an "app" when it was actually a mobile-optimized website (or "web app"). For days I saw people on Twitter saying they couldn't find the app on the Android Market or iTunes and couldn't download it. Well, that's because it didn't exist. It was a website. This created a ton of confusion. Not to mention that they didn't even "turn it on" until 6AM in the morning, so people couldn't properly familiarize themselves with how it worked on their personal phone beforehand.
So, the end result was that 30,000+ of the most active and fired-up volunteers were wandering around confused and frustrated when they could have been doing anything else to help. Like driving people to the polls, phone-banking, walking door-to-door, etc. We lost by fairly small margins in Florida, Virginia, Ohio and Colorado. If this had worked could it have closed the gap? I sure hope not for my sanity's sake.
Now that the election is over, the maxim that success has many fathers while failure is no orphan holds true: ten days after the election no one has stepped forward to claim ownership of Orca.
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