[Iowa-dx] Fwd: [ballot-access]Arkansas Project: 15-20 volunteers needed ASAP

[hhart@blue.weeg.uiowa.edu]

Please forward this message to state and local lists as you deem appropriate=
.

We are currently looking for 15-20 people who can devote a chunk of time -
perhaps an hour two - in the next couple of days to assist in the
concluding days of the Arkansas ballot drive.  If people are capable of
devoting even more time, that would be even better.

Volunteers will be given a web address with a login and a password, and
will be assigned one of a number of 5-page PDF files.  Each page contains
up to 20 signatures from the Arkansas ballot drive.  Volunteers will
download the PDFs, look at the cities where the signatures were collected,
and then download Microsoft Access files containing portions of the voter
rolls for the State of Arkansas, so that they can attempt to verify the
signatures.

A signature is verified if you can match three out of four fields to the
voter rolls - name, address, city, and date of birth.  The voter rolls are
broken down so that the 12 largest cities in the state are all separate
files, and then the rest of the cities are divided alphabetically into
eight other files.  The voter rolls break addresses down into street
number, street name, and street type.  Often the best bet is to sort the
list by City, Last Name, First Name, Street Address.  For each of the five
sheets, the volunteer will simply return the number of signatures on the
page (usually 20, sometimes 19, sometimes less), and the number of those
signatures which were verified.

We need people who are at least moderately familiar with Microsoft
Access.  There was no other common software which could be used to pull
this off.

I need volunteers to commit to being able to download their PDF and come up
with results for each of their sheets within about 24-36 hours of emailing
me back.  I want to have this project completely knocked out on Saturday.

More information about the Arkansas ballot drive is included below for
everyone's reference.  Please email me at this address -
phil.huckelberry@gmail.com - if you are interested in participating.  Let
me know how much time you think you can offer, and also let me know if you
have extensive database experience such that you think you will be able to
work more quickly than most people; then I might assign you 2 PDF files
instead of one.

Our hope is that if this is successful it can turn into a model for how
other drives might be assisted by out of state volunteers.  By enhancing
awareness and activity in ballot drives across the country, hopefully this
can in turn lead to greater fundraising for ballot access efforts and also
to bringing some creative minds into our vital ballot access work to assist
with efforts like this.  Our extensive database work in Illinois protected
our petitioning effort in 2006.  We expect similar attacks from the
Democrats in 2008 - and if we can come together like this, we will be ready
to fend those attacks off.

Phil Huckelberry
Co-Chair, Green Party of the United States
Co-Chair, GPUS Ballot Access Committee

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[the following is part of a message which was originally sent out on
Tuesday, September 18]

The Green Party of Arkansas is currently nearing the end of a 60 day ballot
drive.  Arkansas is a "floating window" state and they chose to start their
drive very early - late July 2007 - because the enhanced availability of
professional petitioners.  The drive wraps up next week.  It seems like
they are on pace.

To help ensure this, though, they have a critical need for out-of-state
help to support their efforts.  They are looking to have a number of
petition sheets examined for validity.  They need 10,000 valid signatures
and are operating under the assumption that 16,000 raw signatures will make
them safe, but they would like to know if validity rates are dipping below
67% and whether they might then need to scurry to collect an extra thousand
signatures in the next week.

To this end, we have acquired the list of registered voters from the State
of Arkansas, and I have had Mark Swaney and Mark Jenkins send me copies of
some of their petition sheets.  The voter list, cleaned up and then broken
down into multiple Microsoft Access files (large cities get their own files
and the remainder of the rolls are broken down alphabetically), along with
scans of 67 petition sheets, have been uploaded to a secure web site.