We've shown that the walk is short: people who don't vote live close to people who do. What we don't know is how many people will sign up to be captains if we mail them a postcard.
We took the public North Carolina voter records for ten precincts in Halifax County, put every household on a map, and split people into two groups.
People who voted in the 2020, 2022 and 2024 general elections -- for them, voting is a habit. There are 6,264, about 38% of everyone registered in those precincts.
We first tried a stricter rule: every federal general election since 2018, plus local elections. Only 254 people qualified, and almost none of them lived in the precincts that needed help most. One precinct had 777 people to reach and nobody who qualified, so we dropped that rule.
Registered voters who vote only sometimes (7,023) or have never voted in a general election (2,803) -- 9,826 people.
Then we asked how far apart the two groups live. 95% of those 9,826 people live within ten doors of someone in the first group. If every regular voter knocked on just the ten homes closest to them, 9,306 of the 9,826 would hear from someone on their own street.
On average, a captain's ten doors include about 7.6 people who vote only sometimes and 2.6 who have never voted in a general election, plus about eight who already vote and could help knock. So being a captain means a short walk and about ten conversations.
Everything depends on one number we haven't measured: of everyone we mail a postcard to, how many sign up and actually knock on their doors? We don't know. Our best guess is 1-3%.
Studies of door-knocking start with volunteers who have already signed up. We're asking people to sign up from a postcard, with no organizer in the county. Nobody has measured that.
If only 2% of people sign up, any effect on turnout gets about fifty times smaller when you spread it across everyone who gets a postcard. That's why sign-ups are the number that matters most.
It reads the state's voter, voting history, polling place, address and precinct map files, and saves everything locally. Finished packets have names and addresses, so they never go into our code history.
Each packet is made from scratch every time, so an old, out-of-date one never gets sent by mistake.
We run tests, check how many addresses match, and keep a log of every run. The sample packet on this site is made by the same program as a real one.
If you fund or run civic work in North Carolina and want to try this, get in touch.