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Volunteering

[specific campaign vs party / issue / org?]

Volunteering for a campaign

The default way to volunteer is to go to a candidate’s web site and find a button or menu item labeled something like “Volunteer” or “Get involved”. This will usually funnel you towards various forms of canvassing¹: mostly door knocking, phone banking, or text banking. You may have to give them your email address and/or phone number first. There is rarely any information about how to help in other ways, aside from donating. I’m not entirely sure why, but here are my guesses:

• Campaigns prefer to recruit locally by word-of-mouth, to find people they can trust.
• Canvassing is the only volunteer work that can absorb a large influx of people. They’ve worked out how to scale it.
• There are too many people wanting to do the other jobs. They might as well only take people who are enthusiastic enough to hunt down the email address of the campaign manager, or show up in person at headquarters.

There are studies on the effectiveness of various canvassing methods. All methods are much more effective for encouraging people to vote than for convincing them who to vote for; in fact, campaigns appear to be completely ineffective at changing voters’ minds (with unusual exceptions). Most canvassing operations therefore will concentrate mostly on get-out-the-vote goals rather than persuasion.

That doesn’t mean that campaigns shouldn’t present the arguments for them over their opponents to the voters; this can make a difference in turnout, and give them information to use when talking to others.

If you do want to change peoples’ minds, it might be better to work independently of the campaign. Voters (rightly) don’t trust campaigns to tell them how to vote, but they might take others more seriously. Check out the sections on journalism and independent work (especially talking to friends and family).

There is one known method, deep canvassing, that may work for changing voters’ minds about who to vote for. I’m skeptical of its use by actual campaigns (it’s very labor intensive, for one thing), but I discuss it a bit more in the section on independently talking to people.

Door knocking

This is the thing most often called “canvassing”. Its biggest disadvantage is that you have to go where the potential voters are; if you want to help win votes outside your area, this means traveling. But if you’re able to do it, door knocking is probably the best canvassing method. Phone banking is probably second.

The standard reference estimates that a door-to-door canvasser can reach (actually talk to) about 12 voters per hour, and gets about one extra vote per 14 people reached, so that’s about 0.86 votes per hour. That doesn’t sound like a lot, but getting votes is hard.

I went to New Hampshire once to knock doors² for Kamala Harris. A local party chapter organized carpools (I found them through an event calendar linked from the campaign web site, which allowed filtering by location). We went around in pairs, using a phone app that showed us where to go on a map. The goal, like with the phone banking I did, was to talk to likely Democratic voters, and make sure they were actually going to vote. It was mostly pleasant, although the number of Trump signs in yards was a little scary. Trying to change people’s minds would be scarier and, as I keep repeating, probably not useful.

Phone banking

Phone banking is good, in that almost anyone can do it, and you can do it from home. It’s bad, in that you’re making phone calls to strangers, many of whom don’t want to be called.

Phone banking on average gets about one extra vote per 35 people actually reached. You might think that the increased ease of reaching people by phone would make this better than door knocking, but apparently not; phone bankers in the well-known studies only reached about 16 people per hour, for an average of 0.46 votes per hour, barely more than half the rate of door-to-door. And those studies were mostly in the late 1990s through 2010 or so; people answer calls a lot less often than they used to.

I phone banked a few times for Kamala Harris in 2024. I didn’t love it. In fact it completely wrecked my voice for a few weeks, and felt like a very inefficient use of time. But it’s probably the most useful thing I did for that election, aside from donating.

Some of this is probably unique to the Democratic party, and it may not be the same for all races. I suspect it’s a little easier for local offices. But I’m pretty sure they use the same system for most major races.

You can’t just go to a web site, read some instructions, and make some calls. Phone banking works in shifts, which are scheduled for particular times. You sign up for a shift, and when it starts, you join a massive Zoom call. They do a bunch of intros of the people running it, and there’s often a pep talk from a real politician (which can be genuinely inspiring, but gets old quickly). They give you some basic instruction on how to talk to voters.

Then they tell you about the specific goals of the shift. For example, probably all the calls will be to people in a particular state (for congressional races, this would obviously be true, but it was true for the presidential election too). My first time, we were calling people in Arizona, and I was taken aback to learn that we were also expected to ask people to vote for the Senate candidate (now Senator), Ruben Gallego, who I had never heard of. I quickly Googled him and discovered that his opponent was Kari Lake, which made it very easy for me to get behind him.

The calls are made through a web site, rather than on an actual phone. (I think there’s an option to use your phone instead, but you still have to have the web site open in front of you.) There’s a button to start a call. It uses one of those annoying time-saving systems where it tries to connect you to a call that has already been ringing, right after the person answers, so you usually don’t hear them say “Hello?”, and just have to assume they said it, and start talking.

The calls were only to people who were considered likely to vote for Democrats if they voted at all; the goal was to encourage them to vote. Most of them didn’t answer, and we were told not to leave voice messages. If they did answer, there was a branching script on the screen that we were supposed to follow approximately. Answers to various common questions were available too; the most important one was how the person could find their polling place.

Most people were at least polite, and some even seemed happy to hear from us. Occasionally we’d accidentally reach a Republican, in which case we were instructed not to try to convert them. Even most of them were not hostile.

There was a way to add the person to a Do Not Call list if they asked. I never figured out what the scope of that list was: was it just for the campaign(s) we were calling about? For all Democrats? (Haha, is the DNC list for the whole DNC?) Not many people asked to be on the list.

I also was not sure whether people were guaranteed to get only one call for a particular race, if they did not ask to be on the DNC list. They definitely get called again if they don’t answer.

The second time I phone banked, we were calling people who were known to rarely answer, and we were supposed to leave a voice message. Apparently there are studies showing that voice messages don’t do any good, but for these particular people, there was apparently some reason to think that it might help. There was a very precise script, which I thought could have been improved a lot, but they told us we must read it exactly as written (no one was sure why, though). This was the session that really wrecked my voice. Normally most calls go to voice mail, and then you try another call; but when leaving messages, you’re talking almost all the time. If I ended up in another shift like this, I think I might just leave.

I think there are shifts where they try to change people’s minds, but they look for people with more experience.

I thought the web app could have used a lot of improvements, but I could not figure out who had made it, or how to send them suggestions (or volunteer to help). I will say this in its favor, though: it seemed solid and reliable. That’s the best feature that software can have.

Text banking

I hate text spam, including political texts. It’s clear that a lot of other people do too. It’s kind of hard for me to believe that they help: if you do something people hate, won’t they be less likely to vote for you?

I want to discourage people from contributing to the perception that text spam is normal and inevitable. I think all major parties and candidates should join together in repudiating all opt-out text messaging, and say, “If you receive a text asking you to vote for me or contribute to my campaign, it’s not from me. It’s a scam.” (There are a lot of text scams and sketchy fundraisers: PACs that send tons of text spam and pass along only a small fraction of donations to actual candidates).

There is, of course, evidence that texting works. This study found that cold text messaging would typically increase a voter’s chance of voting by about 0.25 percentage points, although they say “Optimization of data, message, and targeting efforts can increase the effect of assignment to 0.43pp.” That’s about one vote per 233 texts sent, best case. Text banking systems can let one person send a lot more than 233 texts per hour, so that easily beats door knocking, which seems to get less than one vote per hour.

But that study was done in the 2018 election. How many more texts get sent now? It’s just an insane amount these days. Sure, if someone receives one political text per year, they’re probably a bit more likely to vote for the sender (or give them money, whatever the goal of the text is). Two texts, a bit more likely. But there will be diminishing returns, and I would think that at some point, it might start having a negative effect. My question is whether we know where that point is, and whether we’re past it.

At any rate, I’m sure the effectiveness has gone down, if only because spam filtering for texts is a lot better now, and probably also because people are just sick of political texts. I don’t have evidence for this, but it makes sense.

Also I hate text spam, so I don’t really want to encourage people to do it.

There are some studies that show much higher votes-per-text rates, but that’s because they weren’t “cold” texts; people had signed up to receive texts from an organization, or in some cases were receiving real personal texts from people they knew. By all means, send texts to your friends.

[need info on how it works - I think there was some system that is almost completely automated, but each text has to be individually approved for legal reasons, so there’s a web site where you have a list of numbers, and you click on each one to approve it. (As far as I can tell this is not necessary after Facebook v Duguid, though the FCC’s web site disagrees, and there might be state laws that I’m not aware of.)]

Mailings

Not sure a volunteer can really help much with this, but mass mailings are useful. One of the most effective get-out-the-vote methods ever studied was a letter that listed the voting records of the recipient’s neighbors. That increased turnout by 8.1 percentage points, at a cost of about $1.93 per vote, compared with $20/vote for paid door-to-door canvassers or $35/vote for paid phone canvassers (of course most canvassers are not paid). It also measurably annoyed the recipients (although surely all these other methods do that too).

Tabling / pamphleting

Fundraising

Postcards / letters

Postcard or letter-writing campaigns are generally organized by independent organizations, not candidate campaigns.The idea is that a handwritten note will have much more meaning to a potential voter than a phone call or text. (This is literally a job that cannot be done by AI.)

I took part in one postcard campaign in 2024 and another in 2026. In both cases, my wife got a stack of postcards and a list of addresses from the Postcards to Swing States project, invited friends over, and spent a few hours writing and chatting. The people on the list were believed to be likely Democrat voters who might or might not vote; the text of the postcards was meant to encourage them to vote. We were given sample messages that had been tested and shown to make a (small) difference (smaller in presidential election years than in midterms).

Another letter-writing organization, Vote Forward, found and published evidence that their letters did not make a difference in 2024, although they did in 2020.

At any rate, the effect is definitely small for the amount of effort involved; but the effort is the reason it works at all.

Letters that try to convince people which way to vote are generally considered ineffective. If you specifically try to target voters on the other side to change their minds, you may inadvertently just remind them to vote (I’m not sure if there’s any evidence about this).

Signature gathering

[bit late for 2026]

recruiting and organizing other volunteers

Skilled volunteering

Before trying to volunteer your professional skills, consider earning to give instead.

From what little I’ve heard, the best way to contribute your professional skills is to know someone in the campaign, or to show up in person at their headquarters. Cold-calling someone might work too.

Volunteering to do remote work for a campaign far away from you seems to be much more difficult.

A few candidates’ web sites have more than just “donate” and “volunteer to canvass³” links. I found one that had a link to a Slack⁴ team anyone can join, which has channels for techies, artists, etc. It feels a bit like I imagine it would feel to show up in person at campaign headquarters: chaotic, everyone doing their own thing, hard to figure out who to talk to. I joined the techies channel. They (usually) have a weekly Zoom meeting to talk about their projects. I joined one, along with four other people who had just found the Slack channel, and one full-time volunteer who runs the channel, but isn’t directly involved in any tech projects, as far as I could tell. The meeting basically consisted of introductions, then tangents. I have not yet found a tech project to help with.

It really seems like there should be something like the DNC Talent Bank (see Campaign jobs below) but for volunteers. As far as I can tell, there isn’t.

tech (web sites, other apps, data science)

writing

image design and video

legal

Voter registration

Getting more people registered is a way to get more people to vote. One issue, if your goal is to boost votes for one candidate, is that you don’t know how a person will vote after they’re registered. But statistically, you can do pretty well by choosing a demographic that mostly votes the way you want. College students are the prime example, because not only are they mostly liberal/progressive, but also a lot of them aren’t registered already. I think urban settings in general would also have pretty good odds.

Organizations that run voter registrations drives include Vote.org, When We All Vote, Nonprofit VOTE, Voto Latino, Black Voters Matter, and campus groups.

Studies:

https://web.archive.org/web/20221028061012/https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/ps-political-science-and-politics/article/i-will-register-and-vote-if-you-teach-me-how-a-field-experiment-testing-voter-registration-in-college-classrooms/2752048B2D7F6E703553306C5EF8AB4D

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0261379418303469

Election work

Official election work

[Poll work, …]

Poll watching

Help people vote

Drive people to polls

Or take care of their kids while they go to the polls…

Ballot curing

When a ballot is rejected (because they’re improperly filled out, damaged, etc.), there is often a way for the voter to correct it and get their vote counted, but they’re not always aware that their ballot was rejected, or that there’s anything they can do about it. Informing voters and getting their votes counted is generally an “official” activity, but there are partisan efforts to help get votes counted for their side. There don’t seem to be a lot of those getting started as of late September 2026, but this training from PA Dems looks useful (ballot curing is especially important in Pennsylvania, and you can answer calls for a voter assistance hotline from anywhere.

Look for other opportunities…

Study: https://www.votebeat.org/pennsylvania/2026/06/03/mail-ballot-notice-cure-study-university-pennsylvania-study-2024-election/