Power Tools

MoveOn.org Political Action and Catalist, a progressive voter file provider, have launched a new political application called "VotePoke" that is designed to help voters find out whether they, and their friends, are registered to vote. The first-of-its-kind site allows anyone to look up their voter registration status online and get registered quickly and easily. They can also invite their friends and family to view their status and quickly and easily register as well through Rock the Vote.

The idea has promise, but the implementation left me with concerns. First of all, for something that is delving into such personal information, the site ought to be crystal clear about promising to not spam its users. You start out by filling out your name, email and address, and then clicking a button to look up your registration information. The email is required just in case the information isn't immediately available, and also so you can access your own dashboard showing whether your friends have checked their registration status, but I can see how some potential users may shy away.

The site was developed by MoveOn's technical team, We Also Walk Dogs, using data provided by Catalist. Eli Pariser of MoveOn credits Nathan Woodhull of ActBlue with having helped push the group into developing the tool. [Correction: Nathan is founder of VoteSprout, a political technology consulting firm.]

In practice, I found VotePoke a bit buggy and confusing. It checked my registration info easily, but when it came to generating a list of my friends to email, I got a script error (running Firefox 2.0.0.11). I had to type one address in manually before my list of contacts came up, and it was a partial list at that. The system's status board is also a bit confusing. You get to see a list of the friends you have contacted, but it's not clear if someone registers in response to your poke, or if someone just checks their registration status in response to your poke. I suggested to Pariser that the developers add some kind of counters that make clear how many people are using the tool and how many new registrants it generates, to help build momentum, but it would also help if they made these status messages clearer.

MoveOn has several additional tools in development, including a widget for bloggers that will enable anyone to type in their address and get connected by phone to their congressmember, and a calendar syndication tool called ActivList. Both are due out in the next few weeks.

Pariser described ActivList this way: "Imagine that on DailyKos or another site, on the right hand site, has a little Flash calendar and I can put in my zipcode and see within 5 miles of me in Brooklyn, what's going down. A Moveon rally in two days, then an Obama event, then a chapter meeting of some group, whatever."

People will be able to enter events into the system through a registration interface that is wide open, but people who display the widget will have control over what kinds of events are shown. He says, "A blogger can choose to show everyone's events, or say, MoveOn's curated list, or MoveOn and friends, or someone's curated list of local environmental events. It makes it pretty flexible."

The idea behind ActivList, Pariser says, is "How do you bind and build the progressive community?" Plus, "Why hasn't someone done this up til now?"

Could a nonprogressive site like, say, Redstate, use these tools? Pariser answered, "My experience is that these things rarely hop that way. My sense is that Redstate would be somewhat reticent to post a widget on their blog that says 'powered by MoveOn' at the bottom," he laughed. But then he added,"This is one of the things that we do that is beyond ideology, or its the ideology that technology can make democracy better, regardless." Amen to that.