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View Full Version : Battle Tools: How to map voters in an area




FBodyJim
01-27-2008, 09:43 PM
As posted to my local meetup group:


Anthony sent me his list of republican voters in an Eatontown, NJ
precinct late last night. I used some code I had laying around
(really just a simple mod to a google maps example) to plot those
addresses on a map. The idea was to look for a good "cluster" to hit -
ie, where the list would show a lot of markers close together - and
then using the Google satellite view, you can guestimate (or literally
count) rooftops and find ideal target neighborhoods. The link for my
sample is:

http://www.fbody.com/FindVoters/

As some test data, paste into that top box this list:
============COPY BELOW HERE============
77 WHITE ST Eatontown NJ
250 BROAD ST Eatontown NJ
45 CLIFFWOOD AVE Eatontown NJ
67 BYRNES LN Eatontown NJ
111 WHITE ST Eatontown NJ
84 WHITE ST Eatontown NJ
7 THROCKMORTON AVE Eatontown NJ
125 WHITE ST Eatontown NJ
40 WATSON PL Eatontown NJ
309 BROAD ST Eatontown NJ
54 WHITE ST Eatontown NJ
65 THROCKMORTON AVE Eatontown NJ
79 WHITE ST Eatontown NJ
334 BROAD ST Eatontown NJ
83WHITE ST Eatontown NJ
49 VILLA PL Eatontown NJ
25 WATSON PL Eatontown NJ
163 BROAD ST Eatontown NJ
181 BROAD ST Eatontown NJ
============STOP COPYING WOULD YA!============

And click the "go" button. Depending on your connection
speed/computer/number of addresses, this may take a while as the
script geocodes each address and adds a marker on the map. If you
were to use that small sample data set, you should see:
1 marker off the far left
4 markers in a "line" left of center.
2 markers top center
2 markers top right

Obviously, if this was all of your republican voters, the "best" bet
if you had one minute to hit as many people as possiblle, would be the
4 markers (on White St). Moreover, with the Satelite view, you can
see that the area looks to be mostly townhouses which means that if
you just wanted to canvas an entire area, the area of town houses.

With Anthony's full list of 541 addresses, the image takes a while
(about 15 minutes) to generate on my old, slow POS computer, but would
look like this:
http://www.fbody.com/FindVoters/eatontownSample.jpg
Again, on my old slow PC, it takes 15 minutes or so, you'd think the
browser is crashed/not responding/etc but it is working - remember,
for each address a request is being sent to google to get lat/lon for
the address then the marker has to be drawn on the map - basically 2
requests per address. And note that if you were using the site, not
just looking at the image, you could zoom in and get a good look at
the area/better idea of clustering and plan a good battle strategy.

I believe that precinct leaders can generate a mailing address list of
potential voters in their preceint using the Ron Paul Precent Leader
website. Use your PDF editing/spreadsheet/notepad/Copy & Paste skills
and get the addresses in the format of: # Street City paste the
dataset into the box and wait for the image to generate. Again, given
the time we have left (a week!), using such a tool could help you
identify the "best" area(s) to canvas without wasting time in low
density areas.

If Anthony or anyone else wants to post this Daily Paul or any of the
other websites, feel free to pass the link out. Its really nothing
novel and nothing fancy and I suspect there is a website out there
already that offers such a tool, I just don't know of it and had the
code handy to get Anthony's list done. If anyone wants to just copy
the short source code (its HTML and Javascript with the Google API -
you'd need your own Google Maps API Key on another server) and run the
code off of another server, PLEASE TAKE IT. I don't have a high
bandwidth server to begin with so if this tool is helpful and/or a lot
of people start using it, my server might get extra slow, Google may
also have some kind of limit to the number of requests per key so if
it stops working, that's why. Code is available free, please include
a link to the Ron Paul website on your page, etc. Any problems, leave
me an email - jhogan@fbody.com

I do have some additional code that can take the geocoded co-ordinates
and generate a KML file for Google Earth to generate the picture like
this:
http://www.txstock.com/eatontownvoters.jpg

but I think the Google Maps API view is easier/better to use when
sharing with friends over the internet.

Hopefully this tool is helpful - it's late and I was busy today, but
if I have time and people think it would be useful, I can add to the
code tomorrow morning and do things like calculate the straight line
distance between markers to find the shortest distances between
markers which would help you figure out the shortest walking path/best
density but I'm not sure I'll have time to get this done.

If anyone has any materials they want to hand out, or want someone
else to hand out for them - please email me - I'll be willing to spend
up to 3 hours each night until the 5th to get handouts to people. I
WANT RON PAUL TO WIN and I *think* We the People NEED Ron Paul to win
and I'll do anything I can to help make that happen.

--
James Hogan
http://www.txstock.com/