In our continued effort to encourage El Paso voter participation in the community’s public policy agenda and to empower El Paso voters to engage, El Paso News in partnership with Politico Campaigns has launched an El Paso voter data tool for voter canvassing. The El Paso Votes project contains the voting records of over half-a-million El Paso voters. The online tool allows the public to find El Paso voters who consistently vote in elections. This makes it easy to canvass voters for Election Day or for grassroots efforts engaged in public policy.
As of last month, there are 500,191 El Paso voters. Of those, only about 46,767 voters are reliable voters. (see note 1 below) Reliable voters are those that consistently cast ballots during elections. Expensive software allows political candidates to identify and target these voters. Because of the expense, smaller campaigns and grassroots efforts had to compete against sophisticated voter modeling that put them at a disadvantage. That is no longer true in El Paso.
The dataset behind this tool is the same that allowed us to predict the mayoral election results between Dee Margo & Oscar Leeser.
The voters in the free online tool combined with the ballots cast in the last 18-years of elections allows anyone to quickly identify the voter that is likely to cast a vote in the upcoming elections. Because the tool is free and open to the public, it allows anyone or any organization to compete against anyone with access to the same voter modelling previously unavailable to smaller campaigns.
The online voter tool is accessible from any device connected to the Internet, whether it is a smartphone, a tablet or a computer.
Whether running as a candidate for office or engaging voters, the tool provides a centralized dashboard with the data needed for a successful campaign. Knowing who attended a fundraiser or meeting is readily available. Realtime polling is part of the tool. Over the next few months, the voter tool will include more features that will allow users to better engage with voters by analyzing what issue drives a specific voter. Thus, a grassroots effort for solar energy can canvass those voters that are likely to cast a ballot and support solar energy for the community.
Grassroots Efforts
In addition to containing complete profiles on El Paso’s voters, the online tool provides tools that allow grassroots groups to survey El Paso voters quickly and efficiently, whether in person or via the telephone, messaging or on social media. When it comes time to collect signatures, the tool provides the walking lists, the script and the information on each household ensuring that petition signatures are quickly and efficiently collected and verified. The tool’s dashboard provides the organizers immediate feed back on the number of verified signatures that have been collected to that point and the deployment of volunteers collecting signatures at any given moment.
As the grassroots effort grows and garners attention new volunteers can quickly sign up to help in the effort through the grassroots’ customized portal.
Managing volunteers is easily accomplished through the tool. Through the dashboard, grassroots organizers always know in real time how many volunteers are deployed, where they are located and what they are working on. Organizers can quickly deploy volunteers as conditions on the ground change. Volunteers have access to the tools they need to engage potential voters. Voters can quickly be looked up and verified, and scripts for the volunteers are readily available.
Open For Research
In addition to providing canvassing tools for public policy engagement, the online tool is also open to journalists and researchers allowing them to research voting patterns, survey public policy among voters and analyze voting trends among El Paso’s voters. Research is an important element of the public policy agenda.
For example, the University Medical Center of El Paso (UMC) is currently seeking almost $400 million in non-voter approved certificates of obligations. How are El Paso voters likely to vote on the bonds? The prevailing school of thought is that El Paso voters will reject such a request. But is this accurate?
It is assumed that El Paso voters will not vote for the UMC measure. This assumption is based on the belief that El Paso voters feel taxed out. But what about the almost 47,000 reliable voters likely to cast a vote in November? How will they vote? With the voter tool, any journalist or researcher can create a list of the likely voters for November and model polling to see what a likely outcome of the UMC measure would look like in November. Would the likely voter follow the prevailing thought that the UMC bond measure will fail, or are the likely voters willing to cast a vote in favor of the measure after careful consideration of UMC’s request?
Free And Open
The El Paso Votes tool is free open to all El Paso voters, candidates, grassroots organizations and journalists. It is designed to encourage El Paso voters and organizers to engage with El Paso’s voters in the hopes that voter participation increases each election cycle.
El Paso voters can access the El Paso Votes tool by following this link.
Note 1: Analysis of voter data for the last five years of elections.
Each election cycle, El Paso News publishes the names of the political candidates that the technology company owned by Martín Paredes provides branding and technology services to. Although not required to, we provide this list to our readers for transparency purposes. Clients of Cognent have no influence over the stories we choose to cover. Click here for more details.
There is a movement called the Open Data movement. I used to receive a newsletter from them and I think it was Harvard sponsored. I can’t seem to find it lately and I can think why. Who the fuck in government would actually want this? But the idea was for a government entity, e.g., El Paso City, to expose all its data publicly for public access ( not manipulation) via the internet.
For example, there would be all the 911 call records, street repair orders, invoices, payments, etc. Everything that you might otherwise file an Open Records request for except online, no request needed. Just google it. The idea was to promote the data to scholars and community activist for them to analyze it and make improvement recommendations.
Transparency could be the Next Big Thing.