Election Eve Day

Well, it's certainly starting to feel real. Funny, given that both candidates have been campaigning for nearly two years, for it to feel "real" to volunteers now. Yesterday, Sunday, was a big day for the campaign here are the four staging locations were open for business and running the GOTV work.

The cycle of phone calls, canvassing, and reporting data back to the campaign on numbers of phones called, doors knocked, and actual voter contacts was entered into the system by a team of data enterers who came by the main office starting at 4:30 and working through 11:00pm. It is extraordinary to think that this amount of work, data collection, and data reporting, which equates into hundreds, possibly thousands of volunteer hours in this county of 37,000 registered voters. As I answered the GOTV Volunteer Hotline for nearly 10 hours yesterday, I was struck thinking about the "cost" of a presidential campaign. A lot has been made of Obama's fund-raising/spending machine highlighted by the 30 minute infomercial (and humorously mocked by McCain on his SNL QVC skit, see below).



In many computations we read, there is an often-cited "cost per vote" which is relayed in "dollars per vote." Yet, I couldn't get over thinking about the "volunteer hours per vote" as a more accurate way to display the work of this campaign.

Here is my simple computation on this:

La Plata County has approximately 37,000 registered voters. Obviously the goal is to win the county, so that would have to be at least 18,501 votes for Obama. In a typical weekend day, there are 3 shifts of voter contact, plus a shift of data entry in the evening. If there are 100 volunteers (a very safe guess, based on my observations) for each shift in the county, plus approximately 20 data entry volununteers in the evening, that equates 320 hours of volunteer hours on a weekend day. Multiply that times two gets 640 volunteer hours per weekend. On a weekday, the numbers are certainly lower, but could safely approximated to be (based on phone callers, office workers, etc) at 10-20 volunteers for at least 10 hours each day. Safely, that's 100 volunteer hours every week day, equaling 500 volunteer hours in a week. So, each week, there's safely 1140 volunteer hours worked by the campaign.

Given that this trend is more associated with the weeks approaching the election (and in a swing state), this schedule has been running for probably the past 6 weeks or more. If 6 weeks is used, you have 6840 volunteer hours. This computes to approximately .369 volunteer hours (or between 20 and 25 minutes of campaign volunteer time) per winning vote. And that's attached to assuming every registered voter actually votes. The number of actual voters will be lower, which will result in a higher amount of time spent per vote.

Now, these numbers are my rough calcualtions, but it, for me, puts into perspective the sheer amount of time that this campaign is spending to get out the vote and collect data to help drive decision-making in a way that is quite impressive.

As the final 24 hours descends upon us, the energy is high, but hope is tempered with the encouragement of Senator Obama from the conference call on Saturday to volunteers, that the only poll that matters is the one on November 4 and anyone who gets complacent is hurting the campaign.





















The race is not won. Democrats have a sense of celebrating before the game is over, a temptation Little League coaches around the country try to teach their players to resist.

Here we go.