What is A Voter File and How Can Your Campaign Use It?

A voter file is your currency in any political operation. Political campaigns use voter files to make strategic decisions and attain more support through targeted community outreach. 

What is a Voter File? 

A voter file, or voter files, are digital databases that house information on the electorate based on who is registered to vote, who has voted in past elections, and an understanding of the demographic composition of your electorate. A lot of voter files are curated by your own campaign over years of data collection, or you can attain a voter file through commercial data companies. 

The Ecanvasser and L2 Data integration allows you to instantly download voter data into your Ecanvasser dashboard. Through segmenting your voter file and creating a data-driven strategy, you can maximize the impact of your voter files on your campaign and campaign organization. 

‍Initial Process

Segmentation is the first step in any data-driven process. Refining the data in specific categories helps your campaign team pinpoint niches and outliers to target within your political campaign strategy. To do this you will need to:

1. Segment by Street/Precinct/Electoral District/Zip Code

Depending on your timeline and your position in the election race, in the run-up to election day, you may decide to further refine this geographic segmentation of your voter file and only target those who are registered to vote or who are on your pledge to vote list. Similarly, filter this by prime voters, who are most likely to vote for your on election day. 

This information will further refine your Get Out The Vote (GOV) strategy and may be the difference between winning and losing your election race.

2. Segment by political party I.e. Republican or Democrat. 

Depending on which party you are a member of, primarily target those of similar political standings. Target voters who are not aligned to a particular party through carefully curated talking points and gain their support through nurturing this relationship. 

Go out and canvass these people, be it through door-to-door canvassing or relational organizing, and gather any required data points you intend to leverage over the course of your campaign.‍

Targeting/Follow Up

People who didn’t answer the door

1. Leave a leaflet or alternative campaign literature if the door-to-door canvass was not successful. Inform them of your visit and update your Interaction Status on the Ecanvasser Walk App. 

2. Recanvass the chosen geographical area, increase the number of the canvassing team and call people who were not home or requesting callbacks on your precious visit. 

3. Send political emails or letters to the people who were not home.

People we did speak to (immediate follow-up)

1. Send a political email to solidify the contact you've had. Follow up on issues raised on the door during your field canvassing efforts. 

Recanvassing (leveraging gathered data)

1. Beginning the same way as your initial canvassing, it is important to factor in overall party support or previous voting history. Solidify strong supporters and try to convert them to volunteers, move weak supporters along the funnel to becoming strong advocates, and also try to win swing voters.

2. React to politics on the ground, certain opposition supporters will be more sympathetic to your ideology and party. When that party is on the ropes, target their weak supporters. When there is uncertainty for your party, target your own to prevent the opposition from poaching them.

3. Cover issues that affect the electorate. If you’ve gathered data on topics of interest to voters, target voters through canvassing, political emails, campaign messaging, or letters on your health or education policy as these issues hit the news.

4. Cross-reference data points - data points may include zip codes, voter Interest, previous voting records, different socioeconomic areas, and the voters within them will have different priorities. Identify a plan of action to win votes in areas where you’re position is weaker, to win the votes are required.

How to Maximize your Voter File within Ecanvasser

When using the Ecanvasser software, importing your voter file is one of the most critical parts to ensure you get the most out of what the product has to offer. Depending on the goals, and scope of your campaign, you may wish to consider some of the below learnings here. 

The headings available within the voter file upload process aim to outline how easy this princess is when using the Ecanvasser political campaign software. Here we go through some of the language used in the upload process and the basics you need to understand.

Personal

Voter ID: Including an official government voter ID in your voter file will allow you to upload new information on existing voters at a later date. Without a voter ID, it is not possible to do this en masse. For more information, see the section on Merging voter Files below.

Date of Birth: It is advisable to enter a D.O.B. rather than age, or age bracket. You may end up running a campaign again in years to come, D.O.B. ensures that your information will be up to date!

Address

Precinct Name: Precincts are common electoral areas in the United States, in other jurisdictions, the term may vary; however the use of data remains the same! It is worthwhile completing this if your campaign spans many electoral districts as it will help you to later segment your People Database.

Address: Your Address must be broken into at least three sections, though it may be broken into more if this is how you received your voter file. The required fields are:

• Street Name: Can contain the bulk of the address information
• City/Town: Should be the largest individual settlement contained in the address, generally what appears on an address above what appears in State/County
• State/County: Should be a State within the US or a County/Province outside of the US

Longitude/Latitude: if you wish, and have the relevant data available to you, you may use this, rather than having us Geocode the addresses for you.

Other Fields

Volunteer: Some of your team are also voters, marking them appropriately may have advantages later on. For more information visit our dedicated article on Campaign Organization.

Deceased: it can be worth updating your voter file under this heading, so as to ensure that needless, or intrusive, communications are not sent.

Election

Raised Issue: in the course of your Campaign, you may assist some of your voters with constituency work, it can be useful to have a record of all voters that you have helped at some point.

New Election: Selecting this will allow you to create a column so that you can keep records of people’s voting history - if people have voted in the past, they’re more likely to vote in the future!