Voter Vault is the nationwide database of voters run by the Republicans. Chances are, if you vote in this country, you're in it.
Primarily what it's used for is contacting voters to remind them to vote, to invite them to come to events, and so on.
In Washington, most decisions -- including who gets on the ballots -- are determined by caucuses and conventions. So whoever will be the Republican candidate for the Senate this year will be decided at the state convention in May, and the delegates for that will be elected at the district caucuses, and the delegates for that will be elected at the precinct caucuses.
So, it's important.
I'm the chair of the 39th District Republicans of Snohomish County in Washington, and we have the precinct caucuses coming up in March. I want my PCOs (Precinct Committee Officers) to call all the voters in their precincts who have self-identified as Republicans (we don't register party affiliation in Washington) and who vote often (that's part of the public record).
Voter Vault has all that information and can print out nice PDFs with this information. But it is a total pain to produce these lists. There are some flexible options for printing complex reports, but few of them work if you are not running IE on Windows (and God help you if you want to actually change any of the information and you're not on Windows). And you can only run one report at a time, and you can't do batch reports, and I have over 20 PCOs, and if I have to select each precinct, one at a time, and manually select all the options I want each time, I'll go nuts. And if I made a mistake ...
So, perl. Duh.
It's a bit of a challenge because it's over SSL and you need to get a cookie and so on, but brian d foy did this work already to do something similar with SourceForge.net in Module::Release. It's the bulk of the code. Using LiveHTTPHeaders in Firefox helped a lot, to see exactly what headers were being passed around. There's also a lot of redirection going on: after clicking the NDA, I have to allow it to redirect me like five times just to get logged in.
Then I put together a simple data structure for the config options. Which party affiliation, phone or no phone, how often they vote, order (walking order, alphabetical), and so on.
I keep the PCOs in a Group in Mac OS X's Address Book. In the notes section for each PCO, I put the precinct number and name, so I just loop over the PCOs (with Mac::Glue, of course), grab the email address and precinct info for each PCO, then create the report, then download it. Then use Mac::Glue again to send the file to the PCO with Eudora.
So what could normally take probably close to an hour, now takes me about two minutes. W00t.
Re:Engaged Electorates
pudge on 2006-02-22T20:08:36
Mmmmm, SkyNet.
Re:Cool use for perl ...
pudge on 2006-02-23T21:55:45
:p
Re:outsourced
pudge on 2006-03-06T20:34:42
Whatever you feel politically, at least the Democrats used a US company to build their version.
Protectionism simply doesn't work.
And it was even done in Perl
That would've been nice. Also, the ability to use it without MSIE would be nice.
Re:outsourced
mpeters on 2006-03-06T20:54:40
Protectionism simply doesn't work.
I'm not saying it does. I just think it's kinda sad that a US political party doesn't show their confidence in US enterprises just to save a few bucks. If they're willing to outsource this work at the campaign level, they'll carry that same mindset to the bureaucratic positions later on.
And I do think that a government keen on outsourcing when there's a perfectly good industry at home is a bad idea.Re:outsourced
pudge on 2006-03-06T23:57:13
I just think it's kinda sad that a US political party doesn't show their confidence in US enterprises just to save a few bucks.
That makes no sense to me, at all. It hurts U.S. businesses in the long run to pay them more to do work that others will do for less. Far from showing a lack of confidence, what it does is encourage them to do a better job for less money. Competition makes us all better in the long run.
What's sad is that our economy has become so bloated that U.S. companies can't compete.
If they're willing to outsource this work at the campaign level, they'll carry that same mindset to the bureaucratic positions later on.
Good. We need less protectionism in government.
Re:outsourced
Phred on 2006-03-07T07:11:06
>> And it was even done in Perl
>That would've been nice. Also, the ability to use it without MSIE would be nice.
Several years ago I worked for a political software startup and we proposed an enterprise level voter management application to the Republicans, all built in Perl and PostgreSQL. We had a really well developed product, but the cost to scale it to that level was the prohibiting factor. We had the custom report building capability that you are talking about, but getting it to run fast over hundreds of millions of records was no small task! We starting working with the Democrats after that, who were more willing to embrace the technology.
Partisan differences aside, political software is a fun endeavour, but imho it's still in the dark ages. Campaigns are transient entities, even on a national level, and building up a technology infrastructure takes time and a committment which many organizations will not undertake. Most organizations have gotten down the process of getting the message out. It's the next step of creating a relationship with the constituents that they are just beginning to understand.
