Green Party Volunteers Needed

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