Build a Voter File with FaceBook

Why Build a Voter File?

[[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voter_file|Voter Files]] are used to identify potential supporters in your local area, sift out voters more likely to support your opponent, and maximize the effectiveness of Get Out The Vote (GOTV) and awareness raising campaigns.

Building and maintaining and an accurate voter file will increase the effectiveness off your campaign, save you time and energy, and help you identify and build support for future campaigns.

Problems with Voter Files and Campus Activism

College kids are a transitory bunch. We change addresses just about every year, we may be registered in our home state rather than the state in which we attend school, and frequently we don’t have landlines. It makes it hard for local campaigns, state party activists, and even our own campus activists, to efficiently rally us around a cause or turn us out during an election. It also means that the state party’s voter file for young voters is basically useless (that is, if you can even get your hands on it). Clearly, if we’re going to GOTV our peers on campus, we need a new method.

The Solution: FaceBook, Your Campus Registry, Some Elbowgrease

With a FaceBook account, access to your student registry, and some time, you can build your own voter file that will blow away anything the state party can give you. Here’s how you do it:

1. Sign up for FaceBook and join your campus network.
2. Perform an advanced search within your campus network to identify your fellow students and categorize them by their political persuasions (Very liberal, liberal, moderate, conservative, very conservative, apathetic).
3. Copy their name and political viewpoints into Excel.
4. Get a copy of your campus registry - online, if possible. This will contain the names, addresses, and phone numbers of all the students at your university.
5. If you have an electronic version of the registry, dump this into your Excel document, making sure that the first and last names from the registry occupy the same columns as your data from FaceBook (ie all last names from both data sources in column A, all first names in column B) . If you don’t have an electronic version, you’ll have to enter the registry data by hand - a daunting task that will take a lot of man-hours. If this is the case, start by looking up your most hardcore supporters first (those who self identify as “Very Liberal,”) and work your way down the list to less politically intense students.
6. Sort your data by last name (alphabetical).
7. The name/address data from the registry should now match up with the name/political persuasion data from FaceBook. Merge the data as best you can. You can remove Republicans (cut and paste them into a new Excel doc. You never know when this data might come in handy).
8. Prioritize the names. People who are very liberal are your “1’s” in political speak - your most hardcore supporters. Next are those who identify as liberals, followed by moderates, then those who are apathetic.
9. You will most likely be left with a lot of names that have no political correlation. What can I say - not everyone is on the FaceBook. These are you “undetermineds.” Hopefully you will have removed a lot of Republicans from this list (this is why we searched for data on people of all political persuasions. Undetermined students are of a lower priority in your activities than those who self identify as Very Liberal or Liberal (or even Moderate), but they are another pool of potential supporters.

And there you go - an accurate, and easily updated campus voter file. Now it’s time to start reaching out to those potential supporters.