I'm waiting at CDG in Paris, so it's time to add a new article to my series about fixing money in politics by looking at another thing campaigns spend money on (and thus raise money for), namely management of their campaigns.

A modern campaign is a complex thing. And yes, most of the money is spent on advertising, GOTV, events and staff. But there's also a lot of logistics, and a fair amount of software.

In the USA, each big election, both major parties rebuild an election software system largely from scratch. It's actually the right strategy. With the next election coming in 4 years, the internet and our hardware and software tools would have changed so much that trying to modify the old legacy is an error. So they avoid it, at some cost.

There may be a Presidential election in the USA every 4 years, but around the world, there's an election somewhere every week or two. So a general "campaign in a box" software package would find regular use, and get regular updating. I propose that this could be done as open source software. Campaigns have reason to be suspicious of any black-box software they might be given, but open source software would let them verify the security of the software, and let them improve it for the world.

There's only one catch. When one party comes up with a great new tool, they want to keep it as their advantage. They don't want to give it to the other side. They don't want to let the other side, or sometimes even the public, see just how they do things. This might counter the virtues of open source. One could imagine a rule that did not require changes to be published until the end of the current election, but that still gives the tools to the "enemy" in the next election. But you get their tools, so it may be a decent exchange. Big computer companies have been happy with this trade.

In the box would be tools for full management of campaign staff and volunteers, events, advertising, GOTV and more. Yes, even though I recently ranted about the damage caused by GOTV, you can put political bias into these tools if they are to work. You have to give the campaigns what they want, even if they want tools to spam, run negative ads and do GOTV. But giving them a nice web site can always help.

The real goal is to make it easier and cheaper to run a campaign. With good software, including good tools for building political ads online and on YouTube, it becomes possible to run a small campaign with more volunteers and less money. That's the real goal -- make it cheaper to run a campaign so candidates feel they can get elected without raising huge sums and becoming beholden.

Election in a Box

Campaign in a box could extend beyond tools for campaigns. It could be part of "Election in a Box" which could provide a suite of open source tools to help both small and large organizations and political jurisdictions to run elections well. Not necessarily digital voting or online voting as I spoke about earliern in the New Democracy topic, but all the other logistics of an election. There are also good designs for open source voting machines which have a donated computer help produce a paper ballot which can be examined by the voter, and then inserted to a scanner to help count it for audited voting.

It could also include tools for doing online candidate debates on sites like YouTube. Imagine a platform where candidates make video clips of themselves answering a set of questions or talking on a set of issues, and then allowing them to make response videos to any other candidate's video, and to make response videos in turn. This would allow any voter to say, "I want to see a debate between these 3 candidates on these 4 issues" and you could keep watching back and forth until you got bored. Software to do this could bump up the political discourse, perhaps. At least the debates could be a little more engaged and real, and minor parties could participate if people want to see them. Pundits could tell people, "Hey, watch what the Libertarian says in the Health Care question."

Election in a box would also be very valuable to the small countries and the newly formed countries who don't have the experience and tools to make such tools on their own.

We in the open source community have done so much to generate and support great software that has been given free to the world for huge economic gain. Perhaps similar effort can save a lot of money for politicians, and make them raise less of it.