Jeremy Smith is standing alongside a flatscreen the size of a small dinner table, giving a demo of a new app. Wearing a KEEP AUSTIN BEAUTIFUL shirt and cargo shorts, he balances a laptop on his left palm while his right hand scrolls around a map of an Austin neighborhood.
“You enter an address here in this lower bar and wait a few moments,” he tells the room, while typing awkwardly on his perched laptop.
After a noticeable lag, 20 or so map pins appear on the screen, similar to what you see if you search for a taqueria on Yelp or want to rent one of the electric scooters that have recently taken over downtown Austin. “Hit the list icon in the upper right-hand corner and you’ll see a list of addresses appear.”
He pauses to make sure his audience is following on their smartphones.
“Wait, I don’t see that list pop up,” interjects one woman, staring hard at her phone. Smith leans over to help.
Around him, the walls are covered in inspiring slogans and printed placards. A small fridge is packed with Red Bull and microbrews. But Smith, 29, isn’t trying to launch the next Airbnb for bathrooms or Uber for aircraft or any such Silicon Valley lark. His unicorn dreams are, in some ways, much bigger: He wants to flip Texas from a red to a blue state by registering as many voters as possible. His startup is a nonprofit called Register2Vote.org, and he’s speaking to Democratic campaign staffers and volunteers.
Smith is in south Austin, in a space borrowed from a Democrat contesting a Republican incumbent in the upcoming midterms. The spirit of Silicon Valley, though, is in the room. In the tech world, politics has often been a distant abstraction. But Donald Trump’s victory in 2016 alarmed a lot of people, and the election was something of a call to arms (or a call to code, really) for even the moderately left-leaning. Suddenly, techies who might have been hard-pressed to locate any congressional district, much less a swing district in Texas, were building texting apps and advertising effectiveness services to help produce a much-talked-about “blue wave” in the midterm elections. One organization called Tech for Campaigns created an army of people with technical skills to help progressive political candidates. Tech for Campaigns didn’t exist two years ago but now has a roster of 8,700 volunteers ready for short-term assignments.
The mapping app Smith is demonstrating is a small example of this tech-politics nexus. It’s called MapTheVote, and it’s intended to track down citizens who haven’t registered to vote. Smith had the idea to create the app, but he didn’t have the technical skills. Through Tech for Campaigns he was introduced to a volunteer—an engineer in San Francisco who had founded his own geospatial data company. In a matter of weeks, the engineer and other volunteers had built the app’s user interface. Texas political realities, meet concerned Silicon Valley hackers.
As often happens with proposed tech solutions, though, there are some snags. In Texas, Democrats have been mostly locked into irrelevance. The party hasn’t won statewide office since 1994, and gerrymandered congressional districts are a realpolitik of entangled topology. The city of Austin, a blue island in a sea of mostly red, is subdivided into no fewer than six districts. The 35th, which packs in Democrats, resembles an amoeba undergoing cell division, with twin bulges in Austin and San Antonio connected by a single tendril running along Highway 35. Three districts start just south of Austin and stretch all the way to the Mexican border, some 250 miles away.
This crazy jigsaw-puzzle map is the result of two GOP-engineered redistrictings in 2003 and 2011. Following much drama and many lawsuits over the course of 15 years, the Texas congressional map went from being slightly more favorable to Democrats to the current configuration, which produced 25 Republicans and 11 Democrats in the current Congress.
But there’s a possible out for Democrats. According to Census Bureau statistics, Texas has consistently been one of the fastest-growing states in the nation, outpacing California and Colorado. In 2016, it gained half a million new residents, many of them from blue states. Texas’ demographics have been shifting too as the Hispanic population grows. Smith needs to turn those new residents and minorities, along with recently turned 18-year-olds, into voters.
That’s where the MapTheVote app comes in.
Here we pause for a metaphorical aside from the world of marketing. What marketers call “the funnel” is the narrowing procession of potential consumers ambling their way toward a product. At the top of the funnel, marketers create brand awareness—the mystical process that turns your thoughts of bright, clean laundry to Tide and not any of the other indistinguishable detergents. Once interest is sparked, you’re subtly guided down to the bottom of the funnel, where interest is massaged into intent and eventual sale. Top-of-funnel marketing is a slick BMW ad in a glossy magazine; further down the funnel is the Google ad that pops up when you search “local BMW dealer.” The political top of the funnel is the voter registration process, which makes you a consumer of a product called a political party and sends you down the funnel that ends in a voting booth and the “purchase” of a particular candidate.
The principal goal of a campaign is to guide a voter down the final slope of the funnel, but what Smith and others realized was that the entry into the political funnel in Texas was so narrow that it limited the consumers coming out on the other end. This is one reason the second-most-populous state has some of the worst voter registration and turnout rates in the nation (44th and 47th, respectively).
Many voter registration efforts are presented as nonpartisan affairs, all about apple-pie democracy. This is true of Register2Vote as well. Republicans also register voters, but as a practical matter many of the unregistered—the young, the poor—tend to lean left. Democratic campaigns have made a point to weaponize voter registration. Hillary Clinton ran a registration drive during her presidential campaign, and Stacey Abrams, a Democrat running for governor in Georgia, has made it a major focus; in 2014 she founded a nonprofit called the New Georgia Project for voter registration.
Smith is an unabashed Democratic operative, if one with an unusual history. He’s a West Point grad who studied epidemiology at Imperial College London and then served as an Army combat engineer in Afghanistan. (There was also classified work with the Joint Special Operations Command that he won’t discuss.) He left the Army in 2016 and went to work for the Clinton campaign in Florida, where he helped manage efforts against voter suppression.
His experience on the Clinton campaign was eye-opening. Atavistic canvassing tools—like the bundles of paper maps with address lists, called turfs, that canvassers are handed for door knocking—were often wrong. “Even if I annotated my list, it wouldn’t make it back into the original data,” Smith says. “It just seemed a stupid way to do things.”
After Clinton lost, he worked on similar voter protection efforts as part of Doug Jones’ campaign in the Alabama special US Senate election. Even after reporters revealed allegations that the Republican, Roy Moore, had sexually harassed and assaulted teenage girls, every vote in the deeply red state counted. “People would show up at the polls saying ‘I registered to vote,’ holding a printed-out PDF document,” Smith says. They didn’t realize they were supposed to mail the form in.
A native of Grapevine, Texas, Smith knew that citizens in his home state faced similar roadblocks. Unlike the 37 states that offer online voter registration, Texas makes people fill out a form, print it, and sign in ink before mailing it to their county voter registrar. Nor does the state make it easy to assist people offline. To sign up voters in front of a Walmart or at a county fair (and then hand in the forms), you must be what’s called a volunteer deputy registrar, which doesn’t exactly mean the badge and gun of a sheriff’s deputy but does mean training (often held at inconvenient times), renewal of licenses every two years, and the whims of a county election official.
To circumvent these obstacles, Smith and Madeline Eden, chief technology officer for a blockchain company, launched Register2Vote at the end of June. The site enabled people to fill out voter registration forms online. Of course, the forms couldn’t actually be submitted to the registrar online, so the next step was to wrangle volunteers to print the prefilled forms and mail them back to the resident with a stamped envelope addressed to their county registrar. This might not seem like much of an improvement over printing a form at home, finding an envelope, and buying a stamp, since you still have to sign the form and mail it, but these are funnel economics at play. Tiny tweaks to a user experience, compounded, can produce hugely different outcomes. Also, Register2Vote gathers something valuable: a database of newly registered voters.
Smith had also been thinking about how much more effective Register2Vote would be if he could target unregistered people rather than waiting for them to find the website. What he wanted was an app that would map where every unregistered citizen in Texas lived. He’d heard about Tech for Campaigns and its many able technical volunteers. In July he pitched the MapTheVote app idea. Did Tech for Campaigns have anyone who could help?
As it happened, it did. Erez Cohen has an almost formulaic Silicon Valley pedigree—UC Berkeley undergrad, PhD dropout, startup founder. His startup was Mapsense, which did location data analysis and visualization before being acquired by Apple. He had just left his post-acquisition job at Apple and was spending time with his new child when he read a news story about Tech for Campaigns. “Politics isn’t a huge passion of mine,” Cohen told me. “But Tech for Campaigns is a way for quiet engineers to do something on the side, in a pragmatic way, instead of making noise.”
Smith and Cohen started talking on the phone almost daily to figure out how to build an interactive map of citizens who had not registered to vote. Cohen had the engineering skills to build the app; getting the data had been trickier. So-called voter files—databases compiled from voter registration data nationwide, which each party wields like a weapon to get out the vote—were no help on their own. Smith needed to find precisely those people not listed in those files.
On this score, Smith got inspiration from Bruce Elfant, a soft-spoken Democrat who is the tax assessor for Travis County, where Austin is located. In many Texas counties, the tax assessor also manages the voter rolls, a combination of duties that arose out of a shameful poll tax enforced in the state until 1966. Elfant, however, is a voter registration evangelist and boasts that his county has one of the highest registration rates in Texas. He also knows where to find every property-tax-paying household in the county and had fashioned a rough map of unregistered voters.
Smith followed that lead, tapping into US Postal Service address databases and overlaying the voter registration data to figure out which households were not registered. He provided the data to Cohen and his team of coders to render in the MapTheVote app. Eventually it included all counties in Texas.
The data was imperfect. It can miss renters—presumably a big source of Democratic votes. And MapTheVote itself was a clunky Rube Goldberg of a mapping solution appended to the clunky but functional voter registration machine of Register2Vote, but it would have to do. It was late August and the last day of new voter registration was October 9. Time was running out: time to take MapTheVote for a spin.
It’s the Sunday before Labor Day, and the temperatures have cooled from a heat-stroke-inducing 97 degrees to a merely sweat-through-your-shirt low 90s. I’ve driven with Smith and Eden to a middle-class neighborhood of modest homes in south Austin. There are a few SUVs and sedans along with the Texas-standard pickup trucks. Smith and Eden fire up the MapTheVote app and wait for a list of unregistered households to load. Divvying up the list, they start knocking on doors. Not everyone loves a stranger approaching their home with a tablet in hand. Smith was deployed in war zones in the Army, but, he tells me, “the only time an American has pulled a gun on me was canvassing for voter registration in Texas.”
At one corner house, a garage door is open and I can hear a leaf blower running. Breaking the journalistic fourth wall, I gesticulate wildly to Smith that the target is in the back. Contact made, it turns out our yard worker is already registered, revealing a bug in the MapTheVote dataflow.
“Hmmm,” Smith muses as he stares into his smartphone and navigates away from MapTheVote to a program that contains data from the Democratic National Committee’s file of registered voters. This hiccup underlines a key problem. Despite rich data on registered voters and a proliferation of consumer data on all of us, there is no systematic way to target the very specific data set of unregistered citizens. The Democratic voter file does indeed show the leaf blower as registered. Smith deletes the resident from MapTheVote’s databases and moves on to the next pin.
At one house, a youngish resident, clearly completely stoned, seems not in the mood for patriotic duties. Another, a middle-aged guy, readily accepts the offer to register via Smith’s phablet. One click in the MapTheVote app takes him to a mobile-optimized version of Register2Vote, the geotargeting piece segueing nicely to the voter registration one. The new Texas resident enters his data into the pipeline that will eventually run to a roomful of envelope-stuffing volunteers.
In a little under an hour Smith and Eden manage to sign up six people out of 15 houses, a good rate when you consider how many doors they would have had to knock on without MapTheVote’s guidance. That said, Texas does not register voters by party, and for all they know they could have just made contact with six Republicans. Good for democracy but not for Smith’s hope to turn Texas blue.
“Texas isn’t a red state, it’s a nonvoting state,” says Glen Maxey, legislative affairs director at the Texas Democratic Party. That’s especially true of demographic groups most likely to vote for Democrats. In the 2014 midterm elections, according to the Census Bureau, Hispanics constituted 29 percent of the state’s citizens but only 19 percent of voters. Non-Hispanic whites, conversely, made up 54 percent of the population but 65 percent of voters. It’s as if the Texas electorate is a slow, lagging reflection of the demographic reality.
Democrats are hoping that those wider demographic changes will help Beto O’Rourke defeat Ted Cruz in his US Senate race, as well as flip a handful of congressional contests. One long-shot campaign is that of Joseph Kopser, an Army veteran and political newbie who is running against Chip Roy, a Texas GOP stalwart who worked for Ted Cruz and former governor Rick Perry. Around the time he was launching Register2Vote, Smith signed up to do special projects for Kopser. He’s running in a traditionally Republican district, but Kopser’s West Point pedigree makes him the sort of candidate who might be helped if more citizens of a moderate bent registered and came out to vote.
Other people are trying to increase voter registration on a national scale. Debra Cleaver is founder and CEO of Vote.org, a nonprofit startup that serves as a one-stop online shop for Americans looking to exercise their voting rights. The service takes the often kludgy experience of online or paper voter registration in 50 states and wraps it into a polished user experience. More than 300,000 people have registered in their states by coming through the site this year. In addition, with a bit of hacker spirit, Vote.org also faxes in applications that people have e-signed for some states, such as Colorado and Kansas.
Cleaver is a Y Combinator alum, oversees a team of engineers, and otherwise comes off as an emblematic Silicon Valley startup founder. So, naturally, she speaks fluent marketing-ese when discussing the cost per action of getting another American enfranchised. “Our CPAs are in the $2 to $3 range when we spend on advertising,” she says. “Door knocking could be hundreds in CPA.” By her calculations, going door to door to register voters is a bit insane. But, as with internet advertising, targeting could change that. Smith and Eden were able to hit the right houses without knocking on every door, just as that creepy ad for a pair of shoes you browsed online manages to find you on Facebook.
What doesn’t change with more and better-visualized data is the backend of the mapping and voter registration hybrid, the part that touches Texas bureaucracy. In an Austin office of the Travis County Democratic Party, long tables of volunteers gather twice a week to print and fold filled-out voter registration forms and stuff them into envelopes. The envelopes are collected and bundled into postal-service bins with the manual bustle of a Dickens-era factory.
On the wall there’s a large poster with an iridescent blue map of Texas and the words TURN TEXAS BLUE. This is the long-standing fever dream of Democrats nationwide. If Texas voted blue, there would be no more election-night nail-biters waiting for Florida or Ohio results.
Fired up with that vision, Smith persists. The day I visited, Register2Vote sent out around 19,000 voter registration forms. Smith had 64,000 more forms ready to go out before the October 9 voter registration deadline. Texas won’t turn blue in one election, but Smith and the Tech for Campaigns teams helping more than 100 races nationwide hope the blue wave starts with them.
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Antonio García Martínez (@antoniogm) is a contributor to wired’s Ideas section and the author of Chaos Monkeys.
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