Greetings!
With the November election fast approaching and ballots being mailed out at the end of next week, I wanted to briefly highlight two data tools that can be helpful for our civic engagement work. As always if you have any questions or would like any assistance with these please don't hesitate to contact me by email or phone (503-239-8029).
--Seth Purdy |
Automatic Exclusion of Already Voted in VAN
Mailing of ballots for the 2011 November election will begin next Friday (21st) and they should be in voters' hands just a few days thereafter. From then on voting will be underway and cast ballots will be arriving daily at elections county offices around the state. Starting Monday, October 24th, the lists of voters whose ballots have been received will be marked in VAN each day, excluding weekends. This is useful for anyone doing late electoral work as it allows easy exclusion of these folks from contact lists.
Any new lists created in VAN during the voting period will exclude these voters by defualt. The same is true for any call or walk sheets that are printed. So, if you're creating lists or generating call or walk sheets for something other than electoral work, make sure to disable this exclusion!
The option can be found under the "Early Voting" section when creating a list, and near the bottom of the available options when printing call or walk lists. Simply uncheck the box before creating your list to remove the exclusion of early voters:
Note that you'll have to do this each time you create a list, or perform any other operation on a list (add, remove, or narrow).
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November 2011 Turnout Model
We now have a voter turnout model for the November 2011 election available on VAN. Constructed from a robust national dataset and based on vote history and many other pieces of demographic data, it assigns a score from roughly 0 to 100 to every voter, ranking their likelihood to cast a ballot in the election. Those with higher scores are predicted more likely to vote than those with lower scores.
It can be used to easily pull the list of the most likely voters that fits your program capacity. Just work down from the top of the score range until the resulting list is the size you need. You'll always be adding in the next most likely voters.
The turnout (aka vote propensity) score can be found under the "Scores" section when creating a list in VAN:
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