The Houdini Project

One of the things that impressed me most about the Obama campaign the last time I was here was the high level of organisation provided centrally by campaign HQ in Chicago. I was amazed at how they were able to coordinate such a disparate group of supporters to achieve very effective and tangible goals. Most analysts attribute this success to Obama’s background in community organising which he seems to have adapted to a national scale. While I’m sure he was behind the initial campaign strategy, it is without doubt that he has highly astute organisational specialists and political scientists working on his behalf to direct the organisation.

The latest manifestation of this superior organisational machine is the Houdini Project. The Houdini Project aims to track voter turnout on a real time basis over the course of Election Day. To simplify, the campaign will be able to tell if one of the people who said they’d vote for Barack has actually turned up at their local polling station to vote already.

And how do they do this? The secret is manpower and an extensive voter database. To start off with, the campaign inherited massive databases of the electorate from previous elections. Combined with voter registration records, campaign volunteers have been able to contact people on a targeted basis, already knowing their age, sex, address, telephone number and party affiliation before speaking to them. Over the past few months every time a voter has been contacted, any more information garnered has been added to their ‘profile’ to make a super-database.

Armed with this, the campaign will be sending volunteers into all strongly democratic polling stations as well as some of the marginal ones to monitor who turns up to vote. At regular intervals throughout the day, the information will be returned for data processing. On the basis of this, those that don’t turn up to vote will be called to be reminded to do so either over the phone or directly to their door by other volunteers. If they need a lift, that will be provided too.

The sheer extent of the machine is mind boggling. How it is able to extend all of its tentacles into every far flung electoral precinct in every battleground state is overwhelming. The campaign estimates that the Houdini Project alone will add 2-3% to Obama’s electoral support nationally. So paranoid are they of electoral fraud on the behalf of the Republicans that they are keeping the final details of the project top secret until election day.