Voter Targeting (1): It’s More Bang for Your Buck!
From Mobilize the Immigrant Vote!
By Yongho Kim of the Korean Resource Center (KRC)
This is the first in a series of two articles introducing a couple of basic ways of narrowing and refining voter lists (also known as voter targeting) using the California Voter Connect /Voter Activation Network(VAN) system, which can help improve the effectiveness of your organization’s Get Out The Vote and voter education efforts. I use the Korean Resource Center (KRC)’s 2008 electoral campaign experience to illustrate some of the concepts presented.
In this article, it is expected that:
- Your organization has access to VAN or a similar voter database system. (If you are a MOVE partner, you have access to VAN. Contact Lolita Roibal of the MIV staff for more information.)
- You have some familiarity using the VAN system.
Why target?
Organizations and campaigns target their voters for many reasons, but one prime reason is money: you will never have enough resources to reach every voter with a stake on your issues to the depth needed for your satisfaction. That mailer will have to be in black and white instead of color; instead of hitting every voter in your county, you will have to focus on Chinese American voters to maximize your impact; and so forth. Looking at KRC’s experience during the November 2008 electoral cycle, we had the below reasons to target and narrow our voters:
- We were a bit short on funding and needed to reduce the number of voters we reached, while maximizing the effectiveness of those contacts
- Some of our elections volunteers were bilingual (Korean and English), but most were monolingual in either language and we wanted to make sure that when phone banking, volunteers would call a voter who spoke their language.
- We wanted to respond to changing circumstances as the elections progressed
Another reasons for which you may want to target is that your organization is seeking to pass or stop a particular ballot measure, and you want make sure the contacts you make result in larger number of votes in favor of that position.
How do I do it?
Below are the logical steps to target voters, but your actual campaign work may turn out differently:
| Step # | Step | Scenario A: Phone Banking | Scenario B: Mailing |
| 1 | Decide that targeting is needed to address certain needs | “We can’t have Korean speaking volunteers calling English speaking voters anymore! It’s a waste of everyone’s time !” | “We are solely focusing on turning out people to vote, so let’s not divert resources to those who are going to vote anyway.” |
| 2 | What groups are we trying to separate out through targeting? | “We want to separate Korean speaking voters from English speakers.” | “We want to exclude likely voters.” |
| 3 | What are we going to do with these groups? | “We will have our English speaking volunteers call English speaking voters ; same for Korean speaking voters.” | “We will not mail likely voters, and mail the rest.” |
| 4 | Which criteria could give us the groups we want? | Good question! | <- ditto |
Obviously, there isn’t a nicely laid out variable in the VAN that reads “this voter speaks Korean” nor “this voter may not vote in 2008.” There are a number of alternatives, however, for targeting voters:
The usual suspects
We all know the following descriptors for voters:
- Age: young immigrants are likely to speak English!
- Ethnicity
- County, City, and ZIP Code of the voter’s address: self-explanatory
- ZIP Code Radius: narrows the list
Other variables of interest
- Permanent Vote-by-Mail Status (PVBM): these are voters who requested to always receive vote-by-mail ballots, and are likely to vote two or three weeks ahead of Election Day.
- Past Voting Records: self-explanatory
- Date of Registration: if the voter registered multiple times to update their address, the latest date is entered here, although some counties may keep the old date
- Place of Birth: another factor that may tell us whether the voter prefers speaking English!
What to do on VAN
You should already know that it’s possible to create voter lists using the criteria above. Did you also know you can also remix & combine multiple criteria ? Three buttons do the work: Add, Remove, and Narrow.
Suppose there are two voter groups: A and B.
Let’s say group A are voters classified as ethnic Korean
A: Ethnic Korean Voters
Now, assume group B are all voters living in ZIP Code 90019
B: Voters Living in ZIP Code 90019
If you create a list using BOTH criteria A and B, the list will be the intersection of A and B
A ∩ B: Korean Voters in 90019
To have a list that encompasses both A and B, search for A and then Add B:
A U B: All Korean Voters and All 90019 Voters
To exclude a group from another group, remove it.
A-B: All Korean Voters except those living in 90019
Lastly, the intersection can be done using the narrow function. The usefulness of this lies in that you can keep iterating intersections until reaching the desired subgroup.
A ∩ B: Korean Voters in 90019
Drawbacks
There are two drawbacks I have seen at KRC while doing refine targeting:
- If you sub-divide your mailing list too much, you may see an increase in your mailing costs. Instead of sending one piece of mail to voters, you may end up sending two different ones; this can result in fewer zip code areas meeting bulk mail standards.
- Every time you divide the lists into subgroups, the person in charge of operating the VAN and pulling voter lists will have more work to do. At KRC we divided our groups into six groups for purposes of phone banking. This meant that almost every step needed to be repeated six times in each of the groups, with the danger of errors being introduced in the process.
To be continued
Now that I got your imagination flying, are you ready for more? I’ll be back in the next issue with some practical examples and operations needed to avoid list overlap.
For more information about California VoterConnect, contact Dan Ancona .
For more information about MIV’s technology support, contact Lolita Roibal .
Tags: Korean Resource Center, Mobilize the Immigrant Vote!, Voter Activation Network, VoterActivation, VoterConnect, Yongho Kim
October 22nd, 2009 at 8:14 am
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November 16th, 2010 at 8:59 pm
[...] is the second in a series of two articles ( previous article ) introducing a couple of basic ways of narrowing and refining voter lists (also known as voter [...]
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