Republicans using GOP Data Center, the RNC's centralized voter database, logged about 80.5 million voter contacts during the 2012 election, mostly in battleground states. That includes 14.5 million door-knocks in battleground states and another 900,000 in highly competitive races outside of the presidential battleground, according to Republican National Committee spokesman Sean Spicer.
The numbers confirm what Republicans already know: They were whalloped in 2012. In the Obama campaign's "Legacy Report," campaign officials claim volunteers contacted voters nearly twice as often as their Republican counterparts did — about 150 million times. (That number includes volunteer recruitment and voter turnout attempts.) Read More

New Jersey Lt. Gov. Kim Guadagno announced over the weekend that people displaced by Hurricane Sandy and unable to vote in their home districts should be considered "overseas voters" for the purposes of the election, allowing them to email or fax in a ballot application through a procedure based on one laid out by the Federal Voting Assistance Program.

But the procedure New Jersey elections officials were using was not designed to process such a volume of ballots, and the procedure they put in place was, by all accounts, barely designed at all. Halfway through election day, it appears that the state's effort to use technology to help people vote might do more harm than good.

To reach registered voters on their mobile phones this year, campaigns stand a better chance by recruiting supporters to talk to their peers on social networks, according to new survey data.

While 88 percent of registered voters own some sort of cell phone, according to a survey released today by the Pew Internet & American Life Project, just five percent have signed up to receive text messages from a campaign or related group, and only eight percent have used an app from a candidate.

Meanwhile, 45 percent of smartphone-wielding voters have used their phone to read comments about the campaign on social networking sites.

On a public Google Hangout Thursday afternoon, Mitt Romney's digital director, Zac Moffatt, announced that the campaign will soon roll out an event app that will handle event ticketing and provide a "social" component by pulling in Twitter and Facebook posts during a several-hour period around events. The upcoming app is not the only thing Team Romney has been up to. Over the weekend, the campaign rolled out "Victory Wallets," an analog to the one-click donations feature Barack Obama's campaign and the software firm Blue State Digital released earlier this year. Read More