Voter Info Project

[shaisachs]

The idea is to create a website or widget to help voters find the information they need to vote/caucus in the primaries.

We can take this idea in stages, as follows:

1. When do I vote?
   At this stage, we basically take a primary election calendar and put a simple skin on it. For ex., prompt users for the state they live in with a simple select input, then report back the date of the relevant state's primary/caucus.

2. Where do I vote?
   At this stage, we prompt the user for an address, and then make a request to Google Civic API, or something similar, to get polling place information.

3. Follow-up
   At this stage, we try to collect name/email/SMS information for later follow-up - the idea being that someone who is motivated enough to find this information might be a good candidate for volunteering or other support.

4. Reminder to vote
   The basic idea here is to take the email/SMS information from stage 3 and use it to remind voters to go vote at the appropriate time. Perhaps with a one week/one day/6 hours kind of schedule, something like that. Note that we could easily incorporate elements of this idea earlier on - for example, in stage 1, we could develop an "Add this date to your Google Calendar" widget to make it easy for voters to incorporate election day into their plans.

5. Voter reg deadlines
   Here we would extend the functionality in stage 1 to include deadlines on when to register to vote. So for ex. if the user is from Massachusetts, we'd indicate that a) Primary Day is Mar 3, 2020 and b) the voter registration deadline is Feb 12, 2020. Bonus points for information about early voting and absentee voting! Rock the Vote seems to have a good database of dates here.

6. Register to vote / request an absentee ballot
   It would be really, really cool if we extended all of the above to actually give users the tools to register to vote, or to request an absentee ballot, right on the spot. That's a pretty tall order, though, so probably an easier lift is to just link them to TurboVote.

[Hucxley]

Where do I vote?
At this stage, we prompt the user for an address and then make a request to Google Civic API, or something similar, to get polling place information.

If someone is already registered to vote (stage 0), you can also have them check their voter registration card for their state, county, & precinct, and use that to locate where to go vote. People are protective of information that may be sold and have legitimate generalized privacy concerns in the current tech world. Too many websites and apps want more data, and people want to give less. So, if they are registered, getting voting information for their precinct might help increase the likelihood of someone using the tool.

It's not as much the early engaged folks like us right now that we have to cater to, as the campaign already has all my info since I'm a donor. But, folks who aren't as engaged in politics, in general, are who we need to GOTV the most, and they're less likely to give info to a campaign if they're only marginally engaged with voting as a whole.

And, as an aside, I think stages 5 and 6 should be merged to form Stage 0 because if they aren't registered by the deadline, none of the other steps matter.

[shaisachs]

Sure, the goal isn't necessarily to aim at super-duper-engaged people - the hope is to make things easier for people who don't necessarily know where to look.

There's certainly data privacy concerns, which is why I sort of put that stuff toward the end. But it can certainly be optional (to a point - for polling place lookup you really need an exact street address.).

[allenjhyang]

This sounds like a cool idea - relatively straightforward (especially if the APIs are there) and clear purpose. Was wondering what you were thinking in terms of distributing this website / widget, ie getting it in front of people who could be most influential to get in front of?

(Have you already pulled together plans on how to build this? I think a quick no-code tool like Bubble or Webflow might be suitable for this, but would depend on some of the specs of the more complicated interactions)