Here’s another example of how Democrats are mis-served by spinning up billion-dollar campaigns and then letting them disappear without a trace a few days after the election. Apparently, for lack of an investment as small as $10 million, we’re saddled with an outmoded, outdated voter information system called VAN:
[…] The case for a new suite of tech tools for engaging with voters has been evident to many Democratic operatives and activists for a very long time, years before I documented how everyone was “Living with VANxiety” in a long report I published in April 2023. Indeed, it was nine years ago this May that a collection of tech upstarts called UnlockTheVan launched an effort to get the Democratic National Committee to open up access to the voter data then managed, with the party’s full agreement, by just one de facto monopoly, NGPVAN. That monopoly was indeed loosened in time for the 2024 cycle, and there are now a bevy of impressive startups whose offerings run circles around Bonterra. [The company behind VAN]
But the overwhelming odds are that the hundreds of thousands of volunteers who are going to do the grunt work of contacting and engaging with voters this cycle, along with the campaign teams that manage them, will be stuck using lousy tools that make them less good at their work and using lists that are missing the correct information (or any information) on millions of likely or registered Democratic voters. To just give a few examples:
Canvassers that use Open Field instead of Minivan to guide their door-knocking are ten to twenty percent more productive, because the former allows them to work more easily in teams and to add new names to the voter files as they encounter voters.
Campaigns relying solely on the current Democratic voter file (which is what VAN works with for everything from cutting turf to logging voter contacts) actively miss millions of potential supporters. A 2021 study found that these “politically invisible” voters are far more likely to be Black or Hispanic, younger and less wealthy than the ones in the file.
VAN and EveryAction, its nonprofit twin, do not make it easy to track and measure the impact of friend-to-friend and online relational outreach, do nothing to capture rich conversational data that volunteers may collect from voters, and reward the tracking of contact attempts rather than the nurturing of relationships over time.
Problems with high-volume access to VAN during last months of the 2024 election forced Democrats to scramble to keep the system functioning, as the New York Times reported.
All of these are solvable problems--but for the fact that almost no one cares enough to cough up the money to solve them. And we’re not talking about a lot of money—perhaps $10 million, though it is almost clearly too late to change course for 2026.
When you consider how much attention the entire Democratic arena pays to the problem of Republican voter suppression, as well as the new threat of the SAVE Act, which would potentially disenfranchise or at least severely inconvenience millions of currently registered voters, you would think that fixing the Democratic tech gap would rank even higher up on everyone’s priority list. But I suppose it’s much more on brand for Dems and their allied groups to complain about the horrible things Republicans do. And indeed, some of the worst “scam PACs” do great work extracting contributions from gullible seniors and others by bombarding them with sky-is-falling warnings about what the other side is up to.
I’m no expert on this, but is anyone reading this blog surprised that the DNC has fucked up yet another thing? I mean, shit, $10 million is nothing compared to the implementation budget of common software packages at medium-sized enterprises.
Look, I think Republicans get fucked by their consultants left, right and center, 24/7/365, too. And certainly their field operations have sputtered in the past. But the key fact about Republican voters is that they generally turn out spontaneously. Our voters have historically needed a push, and they also need to be assisted through the maze of barriers to vote that Republicans have created to keep them from voting.
Unfortunately, the leadership of our party are too old to understand tech, they’re used to whining instead of winning, and they’re full of excuses for losing. If you think that assessment is too harsh, please provide an alternative one for the inability of the leadership to spend what amounts to a pittance to modernize our voter information system.
