Learnings from BCV in GA

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Taken from time with Bull City Votes in Georgia

There were lots of organizations in Savannah. A number of them were local groups, but many volunteers were out of town folks who had come to stay in Savannah for a long period of time.

There were people working with the Outreach Group, which was contracted by some unknown entity. There were people working with the Democratic Party and the candidate campaigns directly. And there were a number of people working with the less partisan groups in GA ( Fair Fight, Georgia Coalition for the People’s Agenda , Georgia Stand Up, New Georgia Project)

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Some of the issues these organizations had:

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They were not sharing data, turf or resources. There was occasional butting of heads.

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Data driven tactics were minimal. It seemed like the Democratic Party had some good lists that they were targeting, but it wasn’t certain how up to date those lists were. An example was targeting voters who were infrequent voters who had voted in the general election, and making sure they vote in the runoff. But there were differing accounts on how good the Democratic Party knocking lists were.

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Generally, door knocking felt to all workers like it was not a great use of time.

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No organization seemed to be doing the deep canvassing of the style that BCV does. This is bad because this meant organizations (and volunteers) did not have good local information, and were not as helpful as they could have been to the voters on the ground. This is why one of the most important contributions BCV made to the effort in Savannah was to provide the flyer Tyler created with all the valuable information in one place in easily legible. This was an example of something that no organization had done, and was really demonstrative of the problem of clarity and focus that a lot of these organizations seem to have.

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It really felt like a lot of groups were simply doing whatever they knew to do, rather than thinking about what specifically is the most effective thing to be doing. Generally everyone was interested in targeting or focusing efforts, but there seemed to be nobody clearly providing the data needed to do this. Our best guesses based on publicly available data were as good as anyone else’s.

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What is worth doing?

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Deep Canvassing is effective, but almost more as a training for a volunteer than as a devoted sole tactic for a group. All workers need to be knowledgable about the candidates, election, local politics, voting laws, polling places, and also be sympathetic and compassionate with the people they are talking with. This means that the volunteers have to be really good. Lit drops and things like that may be useful, but there needs to be much more work done on design and clarity of the lit, among possible targeting improvements as well.

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Synchronizing efforts across groups is another need that is lacking. There needs to be shared resources: easily accessible maps of voters and how often they voted, whether they are party associated, etc. This should be doable! MiniVAN has this but it’s only given out in chunks, somebody somewhere has all this data but it’s all obfuscated from volunteers (which is fine, but it’s also obfuscated from other organizations). There is no reason why NGP, Fair Fight, GA Stand Up, GCPA, etc etc etc couldn’t all have access to the same voter information. Well, maybe there is a reason for that, but then there just needs to be one organization which is responsible for dealing with this data and sharing it with groups that are using it for good purposes. Synchronizing Efforts Across Organizations

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That is a good idea. An organization that is focused solely on the data side of these problems, gathers it, makes it accessible in a clear and usable way. I bet that would not only be useful for voting organizations, but also for legal examination and pattern finding of places where suppression is high, issues may exist, etc. Data Tool for Political Organizing

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