Poll Watching Can Win Your Election

You have spent a lot of time campaigning by knocking on doors, making phone calls and sending out mailers. It’s a lot of hard work and with election day only 15 days away you can’t let up now.  Matter of fact, you are probably increasing your outreach efforts.

What are you going to do on election day?  Are you going to continue to call voters, knock on doors or even text them?  Yes, you should.  The bigger question isn’t who you will call, you should have that list by now from your electoral office. It is knowing which voters to call because they haven’t voted yet.  Spending time reaching out to voters who have already voted isn’t going to help you win your election.

Reaching out to those voters who haven’t voted yet can help you win your election.

This is where poll watching can benefit your campaign.  By definition, a poll watcher is a representative of a political party or of an organization running a candidate who is assigned to the polls on an election day to watch for violations of the laws that regulate voting, campaigning, etc. Their main purpose is to ensure voting laws are being complied with, that intimidation or voter fraud isn’t happening and to challenge voters on their identity if needed.

If you do have a poll watcher at the voting precinct then you’ll be able to get the information on who has voted that day.  This information can then be relayed to the campaign or candidate office so they know who to reach out to.  This is usually done by having poll runners collect the data on paper and taking them back to the campaign office.

Depending on the state will depend if you can have your phone with you or not as a poll watcher.  If you can’t, you might be able to petition the electoral office.  If you can or you get permission, you can use technology to help you mark off who has voted.

Let’s enter into the 21^st century and use the technology available to us. Why use poll runners and pen and paper when you can use an app? Even if your polling precinct doesn’t allow electronic devices you can still tally the information and then walk outside and send the information electronically.

Handraiser has an app that will help you track this data and it automatically reports it back to your voter database.  Handraiser allows you to upload your voter file that typically has name, address, phone number and a place to mark if they have voted at the polls or not.

This is a very efficient way to work with your volunteers to let them know who to reach out to on election day.  When time is of the essence on election day, your volunteers will now know who to call, what doors to knock on and even who to offer rides to the polls.

Every vote counts, you owe it to your campaign to give it every chance to win that you can.