berkeleybound
07-10-2007, 09:18 PM
As of now, the real problem with Ron Paul's campaign is name recognition. If everyone knew who he was, he would win hands down.
That said, one method that campaigns use to contact voters is by automated telephone messages. Voter lists are available from local jurisdictions, and political calls are exempt from do-not-call lists. If kept short and unobtrusive, or fashioned as issue-push-polls, these do a lot of good in getting the word out.
Nevertheless, these are not cheap. The cheapest I've found is http://www.callfire.com/ , which charges 3.5 cents a minute. In Iowa, for example, there are 1.2 million potential voters, so this would cost at least $50k to contact all of them.
Instead, we could do a distributed, grass roots system! I've been trying to set something up, but I'm having trouble and don't have enough free time. Anyone want to give it a try?
The idea is to spend about $25 for unlimited VOIP dialing. Then, multiplied by 100 contributors, we can call a lot of people!! (math: about 30 days until the Iowa straw poll, 8 hours calling a day, just 100 contributors, ~1 minute call = 1.44 million calls!!!! 16 times cheaper than CallFire )
The best software I've found to do this is called Vicidial, which runs with the Asterisk phone system.
http://astguiclient.sourceforge.net/vicidial.html
There are preconfigured versions of asterisk that run under a free version of VMware. See
1. http://nerdvittles.com/index.php?p=152 or
2. http://www.asterisknow.org/downloads
The hard part is getting getting vicidial to work with it (that's where I'm stuck)
http://iptn.org/vicidial/index.html
There are alot of cheap, unlimited VOIP providers:
http://nerdvittles.com/index.php?p=71
I used FreeDigits for testing, http://freedigits.com/sign_up.html
since they give out 60 minutes of free outbound calls a month, and unlimited inbound calling.
Edit: Apparently ppl think this is a bad idea ;)
That said, one method that campaigns use to contact voters is by automated telephone messages. Voter lists are available from local jurisdictions, and political calls are exempt from do-not-call lists. If kept short and unobtrusive, or fashioned as issue-push-polls, these do a lot of good in getting the word out.
Nevertheless, these are not cheap. The cheapest I've found is http://www.callfire.com/ , which charges 3.5 cents a minute. In Iowa, for example, there are 1.2 million potential voters, so this would cost at least $50k to contact all of them.
Instead, we could do a distributed, grass roots system! I've been trying to set something up, but I'm having trouble and don't have enough free time. Anyone want to give it a try?
The idea is to spend about $25 for unlimited VOIP dialing. Then, multiplied by 100 contributors, we can call a lot of people!! (math: about 30 days until the Iowa straw poll, 8 hours calling a day, just 100 contributors, ~1 minute call = 1.44 million calls!!!! 16 times cheaper than CallFire )
The best software I've found to do this is called Vicidial, which runs with the Asterisk phone system.
http://astguiclient.sourceforge.net/vicidial.html
There are preconfigured versions of asterisk that run under a free version of VMware. See
1. http://nerdvittles.com/index.php?p=152 or
2. http://www.asterisknow.org/downloads
The hard part is getting getting vicidial to work with it (that's where I'm stuck)
http://iptn.org/vicidial/index.html
There are alot of cheap, unlimited VOIP providers:
http://nerdvittles.com/index.php?p=71
I used FreeDigits for testing, http://freedigits.com/sign_up.html
since they give out 60 minutes of free outbound calls a month, and unlimited inbound calling.
Edit: Apparently ppl think this is a bad idea ;)