Originally posted Mon, 10 Nov 2008.
I’m currently reading the seventh, and final, chapter of Newsweek’s must-read piece on the 2008 presidential campaign, and I came across this section on the Obama campaign’s Project Houdini:
In some ways, the technological challenges were less complicated for the young vote getters of Team Obama. On Election Day, campaigns need to find a way to turn out supporters who have not yet voted. This means matching lists of supporters with lists of voters appearing at the polls. During the primaries, the Obama campaign was able to update its lists every three hours, a pretty impressive frequency.
But not good enough. The geeks at new Media, working with the field department, had created a program that would allow a “flusher”—the term for a volunteer who goes out to round up nonvoters on Election Day—to know exactly who had, and had not, voted in real time. The New Media magicians dubbed it Project Houdini, because of the way names disappear off the list instantly once people are identified as they wait in line at their local polling station. “I have no idea how [Project Houdini] will work,” Steve Schale, the campaign’s Florida state director, told NEWSWEEK a week before Election Day. “But if it does work, it will redefine get-out-the-vote … It’s an amazing, fascinating tool, and if it works, it will be the model that everyone uses going forward.”
I was a Houdini on election day, and I’ll go into a little detail on my experience.
I was assigned as a Line Manager at a polling location on Columbus’ southeast side on the morning of November 4th. I arrived at the Staging Location (the nerve center for that particular precinct) at 6AM and met up with my team leader.
Election day operations were broken up into three teams. Read Team, Blue Team, and White Team. Read Team, my team, were the Line Managers. We were responsible for making sure nobody left the voting line before casting their vote. We also provided sample ballots, food, water, information, whatever it took to make sure people voted and the line moved as quickly as possible.
Blue Team were the canvassers. They hung door flyers, made phone calls, and knocked on doors to make sure that Obama supporters got to the polls on Election Day.
White Team was logistics. These were the people working the phones and the computers at the Staging Locations, coordinating between all the different volunteers.
When I arrived at the Staging Location and met up with my Team Leader, Tres, I was told they were short on Houdinis and was asked if I could step in. I had been to a nearly two-hour training session earlier in the week to get us up to speed on our roles as Line Managers, but I hadn’t been trained as a Houdini. To make up for this, I was given a two-page form explaining the process and a brief overview from Tres.
It boiled down to this: At 11AM the polling location would post the voter roll, a list of everyone registered at that polling location who had already voted. At around the same time, I was to receive a list from the campaign of people that had already been contacted and were likely Obama supporters. My job would be to cross-off any names on our campaign list that also appeared as having voted on the voter rolls. That way the campaign “flushers” would know who to contact one last time on Election Day.
Our line was pretty short at our polling location that morning. We hypothesized that early-voting had mitigated a lot of the lines in heavily-Democratic precincts while hoping that turnout would be huge despite the serene vibe.
Around 11AM, two of the poll workers came out to smoke a cigarette and chat with the three of us from the Obama campaign at our location in the parking lot (we had to remain 100 ft. from the polling entrance, a fact that we confirmed with numerous suspicious McCain supporters that morning). As we chatted I asked if they had posted the voter rolls and they said that they had.
At about that same time I received the supporter lists from an Obama volunteer in a black SUV carrying breakfast for us and food and water for other volunteers scattered across the precinct. The list was long, about twenty pages worth of names in what looked to be 10-point type.
I made my way inside and started crossing off names. It was a long, tedious process. To further complicate matters, the list was taped to the wall inside the polling location, necessitating that I write against the wall with my own papers as there was no table to write on, and I couldn’t, obviously, move the posted rolls.
After about an hour, I had gotten through the entire list and now I had to process the names into the database. This step involved calling a number on my cell-phone, answering a few prompts, and punching in a four-digit code for each voter. Those names would then be crossed off the database, and the campaign workers could then print a newly updated list with the names of only those that hadn’t yet voted.
This is where the problems occurred. The first few times I dialed the number I got a sort of odd-sounding busy signal. I called my Red Team leader and he suggested I wait a few minutes and try again as the system was currently completely overloaded.
I waited. After about 10 minutes I finally got through only to be told by the automated prompter that, well, the system was completely overloaded and I should try again later.
I decided to head back to the Staging Location, speak with my Team Leader, and try again there.
Upon returning to the drab, cinder-block, fluorescent-lit union hall where the nerve center had set up camp, I realized I wasn’t the only one having problems. Houdinis from all over the precinct were coming back with the same issues.
Fortunately, the campaign was prepared for this scenario, and there was a website where one could enter the names as well. I offered to do it myself from home, but the lists were given to runners who made copies and sent them off to a data-entry team at another location.
So with that, I got some coffee and chatted with some of the older black ladies that were volunteering at the nerve center and huddled around TVs watching the early coverage. We were all excited, bleary-eyed, and wired on coffee. A mixture of confidence and anxiety seemed to be the prevailing mood of the entire group and eventually I left for home to get ready for our smallish election-night party at our place.
All in all, my experience with the campaign was night-and-day compared with my experience working with America Coming Together on the Kerry campaign in 2004. The Obama campaign was vastly more organized with a much higher degree of excitement, energy, and sheer numbers. Without the incredible GOTV effort put forth in Ohio in those final days, I think the Buckeye state would have been a much tighter race than it ended up being.
My hat’s off too all the incredible campaign volunteers I worked with on election day. They earned this one.