Use your own voter data

The gatekeeper problem

A lot of field software assumes you will get your data through the vendor, or through whoever the vendor has a relationship with. That arrangement has a cost that only becomes obvious at the wrong moment: your access to your own turf depends on somebody else's approval, and it can be slowed, restricted or withdrawn.

For a first-time candidate, a county committee, or an independent organisation, that is not a hypothetical inconvenience. It decides whether you can work at all.

The alternative is straightforward. You bring the file. The software works on the file you brought. No approval step, no gatekeeper, no arrangement to stay on the right side of.

What you can bring

Imports are built around the formats field operations actually have:

• CSV and Excel (.csv, .xls, .xlsx) — with column mapping, so your file does not have to match a required template. Map your headers once.
• Purchased voter files — including commercial exports such as L2.
• State and county voter files — layouts vary by jurisdiction, which is exactly why mapping is configurable rather than fixed.
• Hand-built spreadsheets — the list somebody maintains by hand is a legitimate starting point, not a second-class one.
• Geographic data — GeoJSON boundaries, and address data from public sources including OpenStreetMap and OpenAddresses.

The practical test of an import system is whether it accepts the file you already have. If it requires you to reshape your data first, the work has just moved, not disappeared.

Addresses become map points — and the quality is recorded

A spreadsheet of addresses is not yet a walkable list. Each address has to become a coordinate, and that step is where quality gets silently lost in most tools.

Geocoding runs through several sources in order of accuracy: parcel data first where available, then public geocoding services including the US Census and Nominatim. Free and local sources are used before anything paid, so a large import does not arrive with a surprise bill attached.

The part that matters more than the accuracy itself: each contact records which source produced its coordinates. A rooftop-accurate parcel match and a street-centroid fallback are both usable for routing, but they are not equally trustworthy — and later, when the system is deciding whether a canvasser really stood at that door, it needs to know the difference. A tool that forgets where a coordinate came from will eventually accuse an honest canvasser because of a bad pin. That is covered in detail in GPS accountability for paid canvassers.

Addresses that cannot be geocoded are reported rather than quietly dropped, so the count you end up with is a number you can explain.

Imports you can undo

Every real operation imports the wrong file at least once — last cycle's list, a partial export, the same county twice. Two things make that survivable:

• Batch tracking with rollback. Imports are recorded as batches and can be reversed, instead of the fix being a database rescue.
• Duplicate detection during import. Overlapping lists update existing records rather than creating second copies of the same household. Without this, two imports of overlapping turf produce a list where the same door appears twice and two canvassers get sent to it.

Who owns it

Plainly, because this is where the industry is vague:

• The data you import stays yours. Bringing it here does not grant anyone else a claim to it.
• It is isolated per organisation. Every record is scoped to your organisation, enforced in the data layer rather than by interface convention.
• You can export it. Including the field results you generate. Being able to leave is the only thing that makes staying a choice.
• Your field data is not resold or pooled. The knocks, conversations and survey answers your team collects are not aggregated into a shared file or used to build a product sold back to you.

See the privacy policy for the full treatment, including retention and processing roles.

From file to a canvasser at a door

The whole point of owning your data is being able to act on it the same day:

• Import — drop the file in, map the columns, geocode.
• Cut turf — divide the area into pieces a person can actually walk. Adjustable by hand, because a field manager knows things the algorithm does not, like which street nobody should cross on foot.
• Build walk lists — routed as walking loops that go out from the parked car and come back to it, not an address column in spreadsheet order.
• Assign and go — the list opens in the phone's browser. Nothing to install, and it keeps working when the signal drops.

Common questions

Try it with your actual file

The free trial needs no credit card. Import the list you already have and see how far it gets — that is a better evaluation than any demo.

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