Chris Dodd's Habeus Corpus Site: Calls and Widgets
By Joshua Levy, 09/18/2007 - 1:19pm

Chris Dodd, along with Patrick Leahy and Arlen Specter, is the co-sponsor of the Habeus Corpus Restoration Act, which Congress will vote for tomorrow. To drum up support — the issue is a centerpiece of his presidential campaign — Dodd has produced a website that makes it easy to call your Senators and ask them to vote for the act.

Restore-Habeas.org is a simple sub-site of Dodd’s campaign site, but it packs a useful punch. If you want your senator to vote for the act, fill in your name, email address, and zip code, and click “Start Calling.” You’ll be given the phone numbers of your two senators, along with a suggested script. Once you call them, you’re asked to record their offices’ response (basically, are they voting yea or nay) in a form below.

Dodd’s staff are keeping a running tally of the Senate’s positions, and will update it according to the responses participants get. Big fans of embeddable widgets, they’ve created one that shows up-to-date numbers of tomorrow’s expected votes.

Firedoglake is using the widget now; look for other left-of-center sites to follow suit.

This is a good evolution

I'm glad to see finally that a campaign is growing out of the reliance on the same old petition tools and citizen co-sponsor tricks that online political operatives have used for years to build their lists with diminishing returns.

When campaigns aren't using gimmicks or contests online, it's the "advocacy" that is most insulting. Users know that most online advocacy tools from candidates are a blatant list build program, but it doesn't have to be that way - it could be like what Dodd has done here, which is actual activism. He's doing crowd sourcing and it's interactive and it's more effective than email spam and it's more open to users (it does not require login).

I understand that many internet operatives have been limited by the tools that they have been using, most of them are stuck with out-of-the-box turnkey solutions and so their tactics have not kept up with the public's growing sophistication about spammers and list building exploits. So this subsite for Dodd is a great sign of things to come, I hope.



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