DNC allies incensed by Clinton criticism

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121. I have to agree with you and with HRC - the database had been neglected

I did a lot of work with the VAN database during the 2008 campaign. After the campaign I offered to volunteer to help keep the database up to date - I knew there were still sections of our area where calls had not been made, voters had not been verified, information still needed to be updated, and tools to improve the database needed to be added. The last was beyond my capabilities, but as a power user I could work with programmers to help them decide what was needed and to beta test them.

I was unable to do much during the 2012 campaign so I am not sure how much had been done in those four years. When I hosted phone banking events at my house in 2016 and made calls myself, I was appalled at how out of date the database was. MOST of the time we spent calling was to verify phone numbers and mark disconnected or wrong numbers. A good third to half of the calls I made ended up being disconnected or incorrect numbers. When we did contact registered Democratic voters all we did was try to get them to volunteer. We did absolutely no campaigning, no discussion of issues, just recruitment.

When I tried to volunteer in 2008 I thought it would be good to keep voter databases up to date and while doing that we could push voter registration - but the Democratic Party does not seem to care about either of those between elections. If we had volunteers working on those two items ALL THE TIME we could contact every unregistered eligible voter. We could work with felons to regain their right to vote. We could keep volunteers trained and engaged and not have to rebuild our teams for every single election. And lastly we could have the teams and enthusiasm for interim elections and not lose those every time.

The VAN database only includes registered voters - we need to expand it to include people who are not registered to vote so we can try to engage them. That is a major failing. With such a poor percentage of eligible citizens not registered, and with such an abysmal percentage of registered voters turning out, we are losing our democracy. The Democratic Party should be the leaders in pushing voter registration and voter rights, and fighting voter suppression. We make token efforts every four years but in between presidential campaigns it gets ignored.