Washington State is a vote-by-mail state and voters have about 3 weeks before the election to mail in their ballots. Voter-Science tracks the ballots that are received and provides several tools to aide in your Get-Out-The-Vote (GOTV) efforts.
1) The GOTV Reports
Voter-Science provides GOTV reports – see the Turnout Report plugin. Note – your account must be enabled for Ballot chase in order for this to plugin to work.
This report includes useful information like:
- voter turnout statistics
- breakdowns by party and targets
- breakdown by result of canvassing
- identified supporters that haven’t yet voted
- pre-precinct breakdowns
- and even heat maps of turnout:
2) Names are crossed off in the List View
For example, in the screen shot below, Nancy and Marvin have already voted and so their names have been automatically crossed off.
This is critical for get-out-the-vote: if somebody has already cast their ballot, no need to contact them further for gotv.
3) Mobile app tells you the ballot received
The mobile apps will tell you the ballot is received
4) Usage with Filters
Ballots are tracked by creating a new “XVoted” column in your sheet. It’s a ‘1’ if the ballot has been received. You can also use the Filter tool to filter on XVoted just like any other column and use that to create custom heat maps (Supporters that haven’t voted) or specific child sheets.
For map users, a common “Targeted voters” filter is “IsFalse(XVoted) && IsTrue(XTargetPri)”. This means “only include people whose ballot is not yet received and who are on the targeted list”.
Technical details
There is some delay between when a person puts their ballot into the mail, it’s received by the county auditor, and the auditor reports having received it. This is tracked per-county, and counties report at different speeds. This means that if you see a name crossed off, you can be confident the ballot was received.
