Just in time for election day, NGPVAN has put out a new mobile tool that helps campaigns target voters who haven’t yet turned out. The cool part? The “Mobile Pollwatcher” integrates with the VAN voter database so that ALL Democratic campaigns can share information about which voters need a little nudge to get them to the polls. Remember the all-important ground-game efficiency we talked about yesterday? This is the sort of tool that makes it happen in practice:
Thousands of Democratic campaign pollwatchers across the country will use any phone with mobile web access to log in real time which voters have cast ballots. This enables all the Democratic campaigns to focus their GOTV resources on those who have not yet voted.
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Using Mobile Pollwatcher, Democratic poll watchers will log each voter who checks in at a polling location, via mobile web. Because of the collaborative data features of the VAN voter file product, all candidates will benefit when one campaign logs a voter as having voted. On the GOP side, while Mitt Romney’s campaign will be using a mobile pollwatching tool, because Republicans lack a collaborative system, downticket Republicans won’t benefit from Romney’s data. This difference will provide Democratic campaigns a critical advantage on Election Day.
We have so completely only begun to scratch the surface of what intelligent, interconnected mobile devices are going to do in politics. An app like this gives us a taste. What will 2014 look like? Or 2020….
– cpd