There’s an important use for the Obama campaign’s text-message database
that’s not being discussed, and it’s a way to help prevent the Republicans from
stealing the election.
We know that Barack Obama’s campaign has done a much better
job at getting people’s cell-phone numbers, from his various text-message
initiatives (including the contest at the DNC to see which state would send in
the most text
messages).
We don’t know what, exactly, they plan to do with them. They
used them to announce his pick of Joe Biden for veep, but it’s been pretty
quiet since.
My guess - and it’s not an earth-shattering one - is that
the campaign will send out a huge blast text
message on Election Day, reminding people to go to the polls and vote.
But they need to go one step further,
to help ensure the validity of the voting - in that text
reminding people to vote, they need to ask people to text
the campaign back, to confirm that they did vote for Obama.
That way, the campaign will have a rough tally of at least a
minimum number of people who cast their votes for Obama
in each state. (Sure, some folks will have area codes from states other than
where they live, but this is not an exact count.)
The election is likely to end up very close in several key
states around the country. Imagine if the Obama
campaign had its own rough count of how many people there voted for him. It
wouldn’t be an exit poll, nor actual ballots, but a minimum number of people
who said they voted for Obama. This will
definitely be an underestimate of the votes Obama should get - not everyone who
votes for Obama will have gotten a text in the
first place, and among those who do get a text, not everyone will reply.
Now imagine that the official ballot count ends up saying
that fewer people voted for Obama than texted
the Obama campaign to say they did - or even
that the official results are very close to the number of those who texted.
Rather than being stuck trying to guess - based on exit
polls or other demographic data - whether the count is likely valid or not, the
Obama campaign will have its own independent
data.
And that data will include information allowing the campaign
to actually contact individual
voters to let them know what’s going on - to get them involved in the effort to
challenge the results, if need be, or to take any other action that might be
appropriate.
This may not be an important move in many (or even most)
states, but in some battleground states it could make a vital difference.
And of course the McCain campaign (or any third-party
campaign) could use the same tactic to ensure accuracy in voter counts, if only
they had a database anything like the size of Obama’s.
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