The amateurishness of local party organizations is utterly amazing.

[MineralMan]

That's true right down to the district and precinct level. Everyone is an amateur politician, so mistakes and stupidity are the order of the day. I'll give an example:

When I became the chair of my local precinct Democratic (DFL) party organization, I decided to make that precinct a model. I walked the entire precinct campaigning. By myself, since there was no organization for canvassing at that level. Then, I create a website for the precinct, since that's what I do. I used excellent SEO in doing that, and soon that precinct website was getting more Google search traffic than the State Senate District's website. It offered more resources for voters, had links to everything useful, contact information for every elected official from the precinct upwards, and had a precinct map, directions to our polling place and much, much more.

I also created a template for other precincts to use to set up their own websites. All the precinct chair would have to do was plug in local precinct information. An absolute no-brainer.

At the next district level meeting, I did a presentation on precinct level websites, and showed some stats about traffic to the one I had created. I offered to conduct workshops where any precinct chair could create and publish a similar website, complete with 90% of the work already done. They could be published in seconds on Blogger.com and maintained with no more work that writing posts on Facebook.

The response? "Well, I don't think anyone will want to bother with that. It's too much work, and nobody will come to those websites anyhow." But, people did come. Any search that included the city name DFL, precinct, polling place or any combination of those showed those local precinct websites right at the top of search results. The template was designed specifically to do that, and I had the traffic numbers that demonstrated that people did come.

The proposal went nowhere. Meanwhile, the district's website had out-of-date information and links and wasn't relevant to the current political issues. The person who had created that website was long gone and nobody even had the password to change it. The URL was registered to the web designer who was no longer around. Hopeless.

What I proposed cost absolutely nothing. There were no costs involved at all. But, nobody was interested. In the next election my precinct had the highest voter turnout in my city, percentage-wise.

And that is why we fail. I'm no longer the precinct chair. I offered to hand over the website's login and password to the new chair. "No, I don't think I want to bother with that," she said. So, I deleted the thing, because I don't want to maintain it as an official site if I'm not the precinct chair.

If we continue to ignore local politics, we will continue to lose.

[Act_of_Reparation]

1. I'd be interested to know if there's actually a problem with this app...

...of if it is a case of people not knowing what the galloping fuck they are doing.

[MineralMan]

2. I have no idea. It wouldn't be a difficult app to develop, I'd think.

I mean its just a matter of sending some numbers from one place to another. But, something certainly went wrong. I don't know what, and won't know, since I have nothing to do with it. It probably was a problem on the receiving end of the data, I suspect. But I don't know.

And then there are the people at the precinct level who were using the app. Training was probably minimal, and logging in probably had two-step verification or some other security model. Unless the people using the app to enter and send the data had been trained and had practiced the process, it's likely that some of them fumble-fingered something and screwed up. Or they tried three times to log in and the host app froze them out. That happens a lot with phone apps.

I suspect there were plenty of people who didn't know what they were doing - in the field and at the party headquarters. If it's like most local party stuff, there was no rehearsal, no training, and just general incompetence. Precinct chairs are just folks who live in the neighborhood. Some are competent and some are absolute clowns. All you have to do to become a precinct chair is to be willing to do it in most places. A lot of the precincts around me don't even have a chair.