I’m reading an interesting book called Get Out the Vote by Donald P. Green and Alan S. Gerber. The book dissects every popular “GOTV” activity known to man, and — based on numerous experiments, field tests, and statistical analysis — rates the effectiveness of each tactic.

The chapter on phone banks is particularly interesting.

Care to make a guess as to how many calls it takes to motivate one additional voter to go to the polls from volunteers callers, professional phone banks workers, or (dum, dum, dum!…) robo calls?

I’m going to keep you in suspense until the end of this post. First, take a look at an interesting analysis of live polling versus robo call polling. (Keep in mind that this article is debating the merits of polling by phone, not turning out voters. I’ll come back to the “live versus robo” GOTV discussion, as promised, at the end of this post.)

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There has been much talk recently — on RunSmart2Win and elsewhere — about the new influence and impact of social networking sites such as Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter on policial campaigning.  But Tyler Harbor, writing in Politics Magazine, reminds readers that nothing can replace the tried and true campaign tactic of door-to-door canvassing.

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Today’s tip is a two-for-one special involving GOTV (Get Out the Vote) strategy and the popular social networking site Twitter:

1. Every campaign should dispatch volunteer poll watchers to as many voting locations as possible (especially strategic ones). The poll watcher should note how long the lines are, writing down the names of voters and reporting back to campaign headquarters throughout Election Day. Campaign HQ monitors the reports from the poll watchers to see if turnout is high or low in the various precincts, checking off supporters’ names in the campaign database along the way. In this way, the GOTV operations director (whether he or she is the official campaign manager or someone else) has a 30,000 foot view of Election Day turnout and knows when and where to dispatch other volunteers helping with GOTV efforts. The traditional way of doing this is by phone at regular intervals during the day: morning, mid-day, and afternoon reports. This is where Part 2 of the tip comes in…

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