I covered The Anatomy of a Perfect Email last month, so now is a good time for a quick follow-up:

Campaign Monitor, the best damn email marketing company out there, released a set of Email Design Guidelines, a technical guide that everyone should keep handy. Even more technical is their Guide to CSS Support in Email, which takes some of the guesswork out of what styling you should and shouldn’t use in your emails.

Over at ONE/Northwest, former Moveon.org Advocacy Director Ben Brandzel goes over Four Rules for Effective Email Alerts. Covering both structure and content, it’s a good, quick read from someone who pioneered email advocacy.

Last but not least, Colin Delaney over at e.politics has just put out a new version of his Online Politics 101 Ebook. The whole thing is great, and there are quite a few pages devoted to email strategy.

The Obama campaign has launched a microsite at FightTheSmears.com, debunking the attacks du jour against him (and his wife): No video exists of Michelle Obama using the word “whitey”, Barack isn’t a Muslim, and he actually does put his hand over his heart when saying the Pledge of Allegiance. But why exactly did the campaign feel compelled to do this, and why won’t we be seeing a similar site from the McCain campaign? A quick visit to Snopes.com may offer an explanation.

The spread of email hoaxes has been around since the beginning of the Tubes, and Snopes.com, a site dedicated to debunking or confirming urban legends, has been around for nearly as long. Because of email’s ubiquitous presence in our lives, it’s unsurprising that the most popular urban legends viewed on the site originate from email chain letters.

Most urban legends in Snopes.com’s Hot 25 list deal with computer viruses, cell phones, missing children, and things related to consumerism. But the decidedly political items all have an overt ideological and rightward bent to them:

• 2. is dedicated to all things Obama.
• 4. is a pro-Bush, but fake, essay by Jay Leno.
• 9. is a false rumor that Speaker Pelosi plans to implement a 100% tax on “stock market windfall profits”.
• 19. details various email chains about Hugo Chavez, his remarks about President Bush, and Citgo, Venezuela’s state-controlled oil company. While the first email detailed actually seems to be anti-Bush, it is so over the top that it appears to be an effort to link liberals in America with Chavez. Other emails speak of boycotting Citgo as a countermeasure against ‘American haters”.
• 20. is a false rumor about the “In God We Trust” motto being removed from US coins.
• 25. is a compilation of emails circulating about Social Security. All false items are uniformly anti-Social Security.

To be sure, there have been many hoax chain letters spread with left-leaning or anti-Bush slants to them. But the popular ones today all seem to be conservative in nature. And they’re quite effective, as evidenced by the Obama campaign’s new microsite.

Why are conservatives more apt to spread these emails around? The most reasonable explanation is that it’s a natural extension to talk radio, which has been dominated by the right for decades. But that’s just my conjecture, and as a partisan Democrat, I certainly don’t claim to understand the conservative mind. What do you think?

A quick note about the Law of Unintended Consequences in action: A post on Crooks and Liars earlier this afternoon reported:

It appears that the RNC is pretty happy with the number of “friends” it has on Facebook. Their thinking apparently is that it bodes well for the November election, as they for the first time have more than the DNC. I’ve heard rumors they’re shopping that story to some friendly reporters. If you’d like to make them look ridiculous, you can join the Democratic Party’s Facebook group here.

Apparently, the RNC Facebook group, in the midst of a membership drive according the graphic on their page, had passed the DNC Facebook group at somewhere around the 11,000 member mark. A few hours later, Markos posted the news on a Daily Kos Open Thread, and the lead the RNC group had quickly vanished.

To pour salt on their Republican wounds, within two and a half hours of the Daily Kos post, the DNC Facebook group reached 15,000 members, the original goal of the RNC (which remains well under 12,000 at the time of this writing). A few lessons out of this, in no particular order:

• Daily Kos has a huge readership. A front-page post is seen by more eyeballs than most national organizations get when they send out email blasts.
• Don’t brag about social media numbers. They’re a fickle beast.
• Republicans can’t copy Democratic strategies and expect to win. Democrats own Facebook. Deal with it and move on to another battleground.

And so it goes, in the wacky intersection of politics and technology…

There’s no better conference on the intersection of technology and politics than the annual Personal Democracy Forum. This year looks to be the best yet as the conference expands to two days, and I’m psyched to see these leaders in politics and technology:

• Clay Shirky, author of the excellent book “Here Comes Everybody” and thought leader on social technology
• Vint Cert, the father of the Internet and Chief Internet Evangelist at Google
• Craig Newmark, founder of Craigslist
• Larry Lessig, free culture champion and Change Congress founder
• Bloggers like Robert Scoble and Michael Arrington on the tech side, with Arianna Huffington, Ana Marie “Wonkette” Cox, Josh Marshall, Jane Hamsher, and Matt Stoller on the political side
• Current and former staffers and figures from 2008 presidential campaigns: Elizabeth Edwards, Joe Trippi (Edwards), Joe Rospars (Obama), Scott Goodstein (Obama), and many more

So plan on getting to NYC on June 23-24 and join me there. The early registration rate of $595 has been extended through June 4.

We’ve all seen microsites used in politics, from ImpeachGonzales.org last year to the recently launched CanWeAsk.com. Common to microsites are a clear message and clear call to action. ImpeachGonzales.org was a video and a petition to, well, impeach former AG Alberto Gonzalez, while CanWeAsk.com, an RNC effort playing off the “Yes We Can” slogan, is an effort to collect non-friendly user-generated questions for presumptive Democratic nominee Barack Obama.

But as I read Micah Sifry’s post from earlier today, I wondered how the virally-spreading rumor of Barack Obama’s Muslim roots could be countered. I then remembered something I saw over two years ago:

Is Lost a Repeat?

Lost fans were frustrated by the unpredictable schedule of repeat episodes airing during the regular TV season, and an inventive fan came up with this solution. Really simple, and really to the point. Even smaller than a microsite: a nanosite.

I thought the same concept can be applied to the Obama/Muslim issue. Alas, I’ve already been beaten to the punch by two anonymous domain purchasers. IsBarackObamaAMuslim.com was purchased in February, and IsBarackObamaMuslim.com was purchased several days ago. I prefer the latter, as the footnotes provide some… what’s the right word?... facts.

But there’s a change of medium to note here. The Obama/Muslim rumors are being spread by chain email, so a website isn’t the same turf. And boring truths are not nearly as viral as salacious rumors.

Back in 2004, the country was treated to the glorious JohnKerryIsADouchebagButImVotingForHimAnyway.com, a site which is sadly no longer active and not archived. I have a personal project at TheHug.com, but I wouldn’t consider it a success (yet).

Are there any other notable nanosites out there being used in politics?

The John McCain campaign has been pilloried time and time again when it comes to their email strategy. The emails are overly long, unclear, and designed as if they were a piece of direct mail. But, as a public service to all campaigns and organizations looking to execute solid online organzing, I thought it would be illustrative to point out exactly what makes an email successful.

Here’s an email sent on Monday from the Clinton campaign:

This email, my dear friends, is the work of a fine craftsman at the top of his/her game. The execution is flawless, and I let it sit in my inbox for several days just so that I could quickly come back to it and admire its brilliance. Advocacy emails simply don’t get better than this.

A Clear Ask For Action

Within three seconds of opening this email, it’s clear why you have received this email, and it’s clear what you’re being asked to do: The primaries in Oregon and Kentucky are tomorrow and you need to help the campaign by making calls. Simple and clear.

Structurally, there are six areas that catch the eye, and they all help hammer the message home:

1. The clickable graphic on the right
2. The three bolded lines, sprinkled evenly throughout the text
3. The two lines of links, each standing by itself in its own paragraph

All six areas emphasize calling Oregon and Kentucky. They ask nothing more, nothing less. If a person reading this was ever going to make calls for Clinton, this email would have gotten them to do so.

Full Use of Screen Real Estate

The software, devices, and websites we use to read our email come in all shapes and sizes. And because of that, considerations have to be made for viewing window size when formatting an email. While many tech-savvy users have adopted Gmail as the tool of their choice, which provides plenty of vertical screen real estate, the reality is that most email gets read in the smaller “preview” windows found in Microsoft Outlook, Outlook Express, and the like.

The email as formatted above, with the clickable graphic on top and the links at the middle and bottom, guarantee that the readers will always have a target to click on, no matter how small their reading window is and no matter what part of the email they’re reading. And clicks are good, because they translate into action.

Simple Guidelines Backed by Empirical Data

So some simple rules to live by:

• Choose a clear message and a clear action. If you can’t keep it simple, don’t send the email.
• Limit messages to 5 to 7 paragraphs.
• A clickable rectangular graphic aligned to the right of the opening paragraphs will always get the most clicks.
• Do not embed links in a larger paragraph. Allow them to stand alone with whitespace above and below.
• Use formatting like bold, underline, and italics sparingly, and only to drive the main point.

These best practices weren’t pulled from the sky. They weren’t determined by gut instincts, and certainly not by direct mail specialists. Instead, they were culled from years of empirical testing and hard data.

For example in the technique known as A/B testing, one batch of email would be sent without a top right graphic, and another batch would be sent with it included. When the batch with the graphic was clicked on more often, the best practice was established.

The funny thing is, none of this is particularly new. The Left had established these practices by 2004, from the combined experiences of MoveOn.org, the Dean campaign, and the Kerry campaign. Campaigns and organizations on both sides should be actively testing all their messages even today, gathering more data that should continue to refine and maybe even redefine best practices. Please don’t send emails that look like this.

Everyone’s favorite liberty-loving Republican, Congressman Ron Paul of Texas, kinda-sorta admitted defeat in the Republican presidential nomination back on March 6. Despite coming up well short at the polls, Paul’s campaign left quite a mark when it came to the use of technology in politics, particularly with organic, supporter-driven efforts like RonPaulGraphs.com, a site which published detailed graphs and charts of the campaign’s fundraising in a radically transparent manner, and Ron Paul Moneybombs, day-long orgies of online fundraising.

So now that McCain is the presumptive Republican nominee, where will Paul supporters direct their energy? If former Georgia Congressman Bob Barr has any say in the matter, he hopes that Paul supporters flock to his candidacy. Barr, who served in Congress as a Republican but is now registered with the Libertarian Party, today formally announced his entry into the Presidential race, and as the only candidate for his party’s nomination who has actually won a significant election, will likely be the Libertarian candidate this fall. Can Barr harness the energy from the Paul campaign and mount a disruptive third-party run? Or is he doomed to receiving a miniscule portion of the popular vote, as has been the case with past Libertarian presidential candidates?

Laying the Groundwork

Barr’s website, BobBarr2008.com has a similar look and feel to RonPaul2008.com, complete with live-updating fundraising statistics on the front page. This is no coincidence, as Barr’s campaign has hired the same web firm that Ron Paul’s campaign used.

On the ideological front, Ron Paul and Bob Barr share very similar views on the major issues:

• After voting for the USA PATRIOT Act while in Congress, Barr is now a vehement opponent of it.
• Barr is strongly against a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage, and touts his authorship of the Defense of Marriage Action, which allows states to ban or allow gay marriage as they wish.
• A rejection of pre-emptive war and a commitment to a foreign policy of non-intervention.
• Working in coordination with the ACLU, Barr has been a consistent opponent of the Bush Administration’s anti-terrorism domestic surveillance activities.

Potential Roadblocks

But the path for Barr to become the next Ron Paul isn’t as clear as it may seem. First, the Ron Paul campaign is a memory too fresh in many supporters’ minds. In fact, as Patrick Ruffini notes, Paul supporters are dominating local Republican delegate selection meetings, electing themselves as delegates to go to this September’s national convention in Minneapolis. In other words, Paul supporters are still backing their guy, only this time they’re doing it to secure Paul a prime time speaking slot at the Republican National Convention. Several pro-Paul bloggers are also wary of the idea of backing Barr as a Libertarian Party candidate because it would undercut their efforts to transform the Republican Party.

While it’s true that Barr shares many of the same views as Paul, he so far has received very little traction in the niche demographic that propelled Paul’s candidacy: wealthy white males working in information technology. Members of Digg, the social news site essential to the viral growth of Ron Paul’s campaign, seem not to be at all thrilled at Barr’s candidacy. As of May 11, only one news story about Barr was promoted to the front page, posted over a year ago and about medical marijuana. Recently submitted stories about Barr have been “dugg” very little.

Mounting a Strong Campaign

It’s unlikely that Barr will be able to replicate the successes of Ron Paul without a strong endorsement from Paul and a passing-of-the-torch moment. Paul supporters remain deeply loyal to their candidate, and seem gung ho in their efforts to transform the Republican Party through aggressive (some say annoying) means.

But to wage a technologically savvy, modern campaign, the candidate and his senior staff must be committed to doing so. But this morning, Barr chose to formally announce his candidacy at a press conference at the National Press Club in Washington. The press conference was not covered live on any cable television outlets, and the only streaming video was available via CNN.com. One wonders why Barr didn’t choose to announce via a web video, as Obama, Clinton, and Thompson all did in 2007. Barr had little excuse not to do so, as he already has a YouTube Channel.

Barr does have the opportunity to mount the most serious third party run since the days of Ross Perot. Since 1984, the Libertarian presidential candidate has not done better than 0.5% in the national popular vote. But today, the libertarian message resonates with enough Americans to be politically viable, and it will be up to the Barr campaign and the Libertarian Party to take advantage of what Ron Paul began.

A new meme is spreading around the Tubes, and it’s a good one. Clay Shirky, part sociologist and part technologist, has coined the term “Cognitive Surplus”. Shirky, the author of the must-read Here Comes Everybody, gave a talk the other week on the topic, and his own words best explain the concept:

The implications of this idea in the political arena are already becoming apparent. Uber-blogger Chris Bowers has been writing on OpenLeft on this very concept. Recent history proves Shirky’s point: In 2003, Howard Dean supporters who rallied around the candidate’s fierce opposition to the Iraq War used their Cognitive Surplus to organize themselves on Meetup.com, create (along with Clark supporters) the Netroots, and donate an unprecedented amount of dollars and volunteer hours. Between 2004 and 2006, many of those supporters turned to local politics, helping run the campaigns of down-ballot candidates, and in some cases, running for office themselves. And of course in 2007 and 2008, the campaigns of Barack Obama on the left and Ron Paul on the right have harnessed an untapped Cognitive Surplus to awaken the political consciousness of huge swaths of the citizenry.

The pattern is clear: More Americans are taking a proactive role in their politics, and social technologies are helping them do it. As Shirky talks about above, we are producing and sharing, not just consuming.

Since you’re reading this blog, none of this is completely new to you. But the Washington establishment seems clueless to this growing trend. A recent Bloomberg News article, titled Obama’s Gigantic Database May Make Him Party’s Power Broker, illustrates how stuck in the last century the Beltway consulting class appears to be.

The article discusses the massive supporter list the Obama campaign has built for itself. To be sure, the list is unprecedented. The membership of My.BarackObama.com is pegged at an astonishing 800,000, which would translate into a broader email list of at least 8 million. But throughout the article, the Obama list is emphasized to be a mere vehicle for fundraising. An ATM machine.

McIntyre, a Republican and former chief national spokesman for the National Rifle Association, said the data entered by 800,000 names on mybarakobama.com[sic] may be worth as much as $200 million.

[...]

Even as Obama’s interactive databases prove to be efficient ways to energize volunteers, their ability to raise large amounts of money may outlast the current campaign, said Tad Devine, an independent media consultant.

“That’s really what we are talking about here,” said Devine, a former strategist for Democrat John Kerry’s 2004 presidential bid. “We are talking about a fundraising network that will far surpass the dominance that the Republicans held in the ‘80s and even in to the ‘90s.”

No, that’s not what we’re talking about, actually. The citizen is no longer a mere consumer. What we’re talking about is a social network (a real-world one) whose power is rooted in its ability to take action. Obama has built a network that knows how to knock on doors, make phone calls, drive people to the polls, and win elections. Via My.BarackObama.com, the campaign has an even better type of data than consumer data: producer data. The campaign knows who has set up groups and events, who’s been making phone calls, who goes to other states to canvass, who’s signed up for voter registration drives, etc.

Just as a four year old child expects all media to be interactive, the American people are beginning to expect politics to be hands-on. Civic duty is no longer confined to casting a ballot on Election Day, or cutting a check after receiving a piece of direct mail. Political activism is no longer the domain of a few die-hard (and kind of weird) party activists and political junkies. As the Obama campaign has proven, it’s something within the grasp of all Americans, because with the help of social technologies political activism can now be on our own terms. Here comes everybody, indeed.

I think I’ll start writing a weekly link roundup of interesting items I find around the Tubes that don’t merit a blog post of their own. Without further adieu:

Four Days in Denver

In this New York Magazine feature from several weeks ago, ‘West Wing’ writer Lawrence O’Donnell Jr. pens a movie-treatment on what would happen if the Democratic nomination remains deadlocked when we get to the Convention. Even though my favorite Democrats (Howard Dean and Al Gore) aren’t exactly portrayed in the most positive light, it’s a great read. Hat-tip to Patrick Ruffini.

Decision Tree: The Obama-Clinton Divide

This New York Times graphic warmed my heart as a computer programmer. Even a freshman in CS 101 could plop together some if/else statements to accurately portray the decision-making process of the American voter. Hat-tip to Mike Connery.

At the end of 2006, I had thought that the 2007/2008 election cycle would be the cycle of widgets: cute little web utilities that could live on any website, allowing the user to take some small but concrete action. Widgets have always been a big part of MySpace, whether they played music, showed a photo album, or just generally wasted pixels and bandwidth. If you use Mac OS X, your Dashboard is made up of widgets. If you use iGoogle as a start page, those are widgets as well, although Google has branded them as Google Gadgets. Facebook Apps are really widgets, and the vaunted Open Social API is really just a Google Gadget library.

So we do have some containers (places) to put widgets into, but it’s not quite universal yet, and incompatibilities are abundant. Furthermore, widgets have been quite difficult to make well. Technically, they require knowledge of Adobe’s Flash, or Javascript and AJAX, or even heavier serious development skills to create Facebook Apps or Google Gadgets. To make them look appealing, some serious design chops, along with graphics tools like Adobe Photoshop or Illustrator, were necessary as well.

A few months ago, Adobe released Photoshop Express, a light version of Photoshop contained entirely in a web application. Photo editing tasks like cropping, color adjustment, and filtering were now possible for free and over the Web. In the same vein, a company called Sprout launched a Flash widget creator, aptly named Sprout Builder.

Sprout Builder lets you get started with some pre-made templates, and I took advantage of one of them to create a faux campaign widget. This widget includes a sign up form, an embedded video from YouTube, a calendar, and a feed display (from JumpTheShark.com, because as we all know, Ted McGinley is the harbinger of shark-jumping):

The Sprout Builder interface should be familiar to users of any Adobe product (Photoshop, Illustrator, Fireworks, Flash, et. al.), but it does take about twenty minutes to get used to. There are several useful integrations that come bundled with Sprout Builder:

• YouTube Videos
• Feeds
• ChipIn Donations
• Google Charts
• Google Forms powered by Google Spreadsheets
• PollDaddy
• Twitter Tweets
• Yahoo! Maps

These are all well and good, and as seen above, I used Google Spreadsheets to create a sign up form. Making a good-looking widget with rich media is easy and intuitive with Sprout Builder. But there are two major features that are lacking from Sprout’s widget capabilities, and they are essential to making truly useful widgets:

1. Form submission to any arbitrary URL – While the Google Forms integration is useful, an even more useful feature would be the ability to send HTTP POST data to any URL. This would be essential to cutting out the middle step: allowing supporters to directly sign up to an email list is much better than manually importing a spreadsheet on a regular basis.
2. Arbitrary data sources – Feeds are nice, but truly arbitrary data sources via XML would be even nicer. For example, the Poll Watcher and Delegate Count widgets on MyDD are powered by XML files that can be edited by a human or updated regularly by a scheduled routine. Because XML can be verbose, more simple file formats like YML or JSON can be supported.

Sprout Builder is pretty amazing as it is. One can create great-looking and very useful widgets with the existing toolset. But adding in the ability to pull data from and push data to arbitrary sources would make it absolutely indispensable to campaigns and organizations who want to distribute widgets but don’t have the resources to make their own from scratch.

UPDATE: TechCrunch reports this morning that SproutBuilder has actually released an SDK, which is how Twitter and Google Forms integration is accomplished. Developers are now free to create their own integrations, and I'm wondering if I should take a stab at the two suggestions I made above. There still appear to be bugs however, because at the time of this writing, the Google Forms integration seems to be down on the Sign Up page in the widget above.

In the world of small business entrepreneurship, especially technology startups in Silicon Valley, a standard process has evolved dictating how to raise money to start a company. Similarly, in the mass media era of political campaigns, a funding process is also followed, albeit far different from that of Silicon Valley. A national political campaign is expected to raise large amounts of money from a relatively small amount of wealthy donors, and then use that money for large media buys in a relatively small amount of media markets in order to win an election. The Obama campaign has completely dismantled that fundraising equation, and there’s much more to it than just small donations over the Internet. The Obama campaign’s fundraising approach in many ways mirrors the angel funding strategy of a Silicon Valley startup.

Let’s look at how a Silicon Valley start-up usually raises money. First, the entrepreneurs raise a small amount of seed money from friends and family—something to pay bills for a few months while ideas are made concrete, pitches are honed, and proof of concept demos are built. Since these amount to loans between trusted individuals, the seed money is usually paid back with only small (or no) interest. A startup can also secure loans from banks at this early stage. The loans will usually stay small because the company is unproven at this point.

Once more money is needed, angel investors are courted. Angels are wealthy individuals who provide large amounts of capital and usually ask for some ownership of the company in return. Angel investment will usually get a company through the first year. After the startup matures and needs to expand, it can then seek venture capital. The money raised from venture capital firms is significantly higher than from angel investors, and because the money is pooled and managed by an expert (the VC, or venture capitalist), the firm usually has some sort of say in company decisions and direction, in addition to equity in the company. A major point of comparison is that VCs get their hands dirty in the internal affairs of the company, while angel investors will usually not.

Looking at political fundraising, some interesting comparisons can be made. Venture capital firms can be likened to high-dollar donors, specifically those bundlers of high-dollar donations (Bush’s Rangers are a prime example). They’re able to donate large amounts of money, but they also expect a high and personally beneficial return when the candidate gets into office. Many high-dollar donors also insert themselves into the campaign, either by demanding the attention of the candidate, or more often, demanding the attention of campaign staffers by making special requests.

To be sure, the Obama campaign has raised plenty of money from high-dollar donors. Recently, Obama was in San Francisco at a high-dollar fundraiser and made a little bit of news in the process. But as has already been well-documented, the vast majority of Obama’s money comes from the enormous number of small-dollar donations raised over the Internet. One wonders why he even needs to go to San Francisco to raise high-dollar money these days.

The small-dollar donors that have fueled the Obama campaign throughout this primary season can be thought of as angel investors. Like angel investors to a start-up, they give their money, and what they want in return is a piece of the pie, where that pie is the campaign instead of a company. Most importantly, the piece of the campaign they desire is vastly different from what high-dollar donors demand. Obama’s small-dollar angels seek empowerment. They want to self-organize and own the campaign locally. And, in what is a major untold story of the 2008 cycle, the Obama campaign has been actively cultivating their small-dollar angels from the very beginning.

Back in early 2007, the Obama campaign launched massive rallies in cities across the country. Many observers likened them to rock concerts. What the stories missed was that Obama was doing more than building a list of small-dollar donors. The massive rallies were building a national network of people deeply invested in the campaign. Activists invested with their time and energy, not just their money.

I attended one such rally in Atlanta in April of 2007, along with 20,000 other people. Several things were striking. First, anyone who wanted to reserve a free “ticket” had to sign up on My.BarackObama.com, the campaign’s social activism network (some later rallies would ask for a small donation to reserve a ticket). There was no +1 or +2 option to bring guests. Every individual that wanted a ticket needed to sign up. When we got to the rally, those of us who had signed up and printed out our tickets (really just the confirmation email) were allowed to go into an area of the crowd closer to the stage. Those who had not signed up online were asked to fill out a contact form and were then ushered to an area further away from the stage. We were already seeing a return on our investment: if we had signed up on the website, we were given a better experience at the rally.

Before Obama took the stage, we were asked to do three things by the warm-up speaker:

1. Sign up on My.BarackObama.com if we already hadn’t
2. Sign up to volunteer in nearby South Carolina
3. Tell two friends about Barack Obama

During his 45-minute stump speech, Obama echoed the same points. There was no explicit ask for money at the event. The ask was to become heavily invested in the campaign, with an emphasis on investing time and energy. As 2007 went on, the Obama campaign continued with the massive rallies, and supplemented those with training camps around the country, getting activists even more invested in the campaign. When the voting began, these angel investors were leading the GOTV efforts in primary states and were organizing Obama’s near sweep in the caucus states. Winning, after all, is the best return on investment in electoral politics.

A few weeks ago, ActBlue launched a long-awaited feature dubbed ActBlue Express, which allows donors to save their credit card information and billing address in an account for easy access during repeat visits.

ActBlue is to be commended for taking on the legal liability of securely storing what may come to be thousands of credit card numbers. Sure, Amazon.com and other online retailers can do it, but a small outfit like ActBlue offering a similar service is rare.

So let’s see how it works. As explained in the post above, ActBlue Express can be added to an existing MyActBlue account or created after a donation is completed. The best part about the profile is that it asks for mail vs. email solicitation preferences:

The next time the donor visits the site, they are offered the option to contribute via ActBlue Express:

Notice that the email address/password combination is required even if the user is currently logged in to MyActBlue. This is in contrast to Amazon.com’s 1-Click, which doesn’t ask for credentials before placing the order. Interestingly, because my email address and password are pre-filled by my browser, I actually prefer ActBlue’s implementation. If I needed to re-fill those credentials in, I may not be so enthused.

After clicking on the “Continue” button, the donor is asked to confirm billing address, occupation, employer information, and choose a credit card account to charge:

Not having to enter in any information or check any boxes is a truly pleasant experience, and ActBlue should expect to see their contributions go up thanks to this. They’re making it so much easier to contribute to campaigns, and as such, have become an even more essential service to the Democratic Party.

As a follow-up to my post proposing an online voting system to determine the 2012/2016 Democratic nominee, Allison Fine has written a lengthy piece on Personal Democracy Forum echoing many of the same ideas.

Fine points out that Democrats Abroad successfully implemented online voting in February:

Democrats Abroad, a division of the Democratic National Committee, organized online voting for registered members of the Democratic Party as part of the Super Tuesday primaries. Voters also had the option of voting by fax and mail and in person in some places. My friend Jim, a Democrat living abroad, emailed me, “I had to register with “Democrats Abroad” before they would let me vote. It was all done by email, and I really wasn’t too worried about security.”

Read the whole piece, as it goes deeper into examining the success of the Democrats Abroad online primary. Hopefully this is the start of a movement to bring America’s voting system into the 21st century.

Last month, Wired profiled ObamaCycle, a social network that helps Obama supporters send each other campaign materials like rally signs and bumper stickers. As the primary season progressed from state to state, supporters living in states that had already held contests found themselves with more schwag than they knew what to do with. So, aided by the social network creation service Ning, ObamaCycle was set up as a way to connect the schwag-laden supporters with the schwag-needing supporters in upcoming primary states.

It’s a terrific idea, and it made me wonder why Ning hasn’t been used in politics more this year. From what I can tell, ObamaCycle is the biggest political social network on Ning. There are about a dozen social networks set up for Obama, very few for Ron Paul, and absolutely none for Hillary Clinton. What gives?

As profiled on TechCrunch, Ning is essentially a free white label social networking service. The administrator tools let anyone create their own social network, and customize it with user-friendly tools. Members of a network can connect in a discussion forum, send messages to each other, create groups, embed YouTube videos and external feeds, play with widgets, and publicize the social network externally using badges. And yes, Ning does display those oh-so valuable email addresses to the social network administrator.

It’ll be interesting to see if this incredibly useful tool gets traction in the political world. I’m thinking a smart Congressional campaign might pick up on it.

Well here we are. The race between Clinton and Obama is stagnant and ugly. The primary season has lasted fifteen months, even though voting has only been going on for a mere three months. No pretty way for this to all end as Democrats nonsensically attack other Democrats, both through the media and online. It doesn’t have to be this way. It shouldn’t be this way. A combination of common sense and technology can make 2016 a much better primary season.

For the impatient reader, the solution lies in an online primary held at Democrats.org (the DNC’s site) that counts every single vote before declaring a winner. For the details, read on…

The Problems

There are so many. You know all of them. So, a set of bullet points is most concise:

• Iowa and New Hampshire’s first-in-the-nation status is ludicrous.
• Too many states front-loaded on February 5.
• Michigan and Florida knowingly broke party rules, held their primaries in January, and now everyone is blaming everyone else for their delegate mess.
• Caucuses are confusing, and delegate allocation in caucus states is even more confusing.
• Too many candidates and too much campaigning in 2007.
• Superdelegates (aka unpledged delegates) seem undemocratic, and no one can explain what their purpose is.
• Any delegates can change their mind come Convention, whether they are pledged or unpledged.

The Goals

The entire system needs to be taken completely apart and put back together. There are really two goals for the primary season:

1. Choose the best possible Democratic nominee for the General Election.
2. Build the Democratic Party.

Simple. So let’s rethink the whole shebang, completely change around how things are done, and come up with a system that achieves those two goals.

What to Drop

Ditch delegates, superdelegates, and caucuses. The whole delegate system is archaic. The one argument for caucuses is that they build the Party. That may be true, but there are far better ways to do so.

Cancel the Convention. No delegates? No need for the dog and pony show that is the Democratic National Convention. To actually be able to attend one of these things as a delegate requires the selling of one’s soul (okay, that’s an exaggeration).

Stop states from deciding their own primary dates. Why in the world should a Republican Governor or Republican Legislature be deciding when Democrats hold their own party’s primaries? At best, it leads to confusion, like when residents in states not voting on Super Duper Tuesday wondered why they couldn’t vote that day. At worst, it leads to a messy, internal battle, like Michigan and Florida.

The Solution

Divide the country into six regions, each holding their primaries two weeks apart. Begin at the end of January, hold two regional primaries in February, two in March, and the last one in early April. All fifty states, DC, and the territories get to have their say. The six regions are:

• Pacific – California, Oregon, Washington, Hawaii, Alaska, Guam (and other Pacific territories)
• Mountain West – Nevada, Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, Utah, Colorado, Arizona, New Mexico, Americans Abroad
• Central – Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, Nebraska, South Dakota, North Dakota, Missouri
• Midwest – Ohio, Indiana, Michigan, Illinois, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Iowa
• South – Florida, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Arkansas, Tennessee, North Carolina, South Carolina, Virginia, West Virginia, Kentucky, Puerto Rico
• Northeast – New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Maryland, DC, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Vermont, New Hampshire , Maine

With the exception of the Mountain West, all regions have at least one “big” state. But a candidate can choose to play in the many smaller states, and rack up votes that way.

The order of the regional primaries is decided by a random drawing on the Tuesday after Labor Day, the September before the election year. This shortens the primary season, and keeps campaigns on their toes. If they don’t know where to campaign, they won’t.

Each regional primary is three days long, Tuesday through Thursday. Everyone who wants to vote should be able to. And no, state governments won’t push back because…

The primary is held online at Democrats.org. Yes, it’s time for liberals to stop being afraid of electronic voting. There’s nothing wrong with doing important things online. We file our taxes online. We do our banking online. The problem has been in the companies and the software behind it. That won’t be a problem for us.

The online voting system will be open source. Linux and Mac OS X are built on open source technologies. Microsoft Windows is not. Linux and Mac OS X are rock-solid and secure. Windows is not. Open source software is the answer to the problems with online voting.

All primary voters must register at Democrats.org. Want to build a national voter database? Want to build the party everywhere? Want to avoid being held hostage to what a state government decides is best for a national party’s primary process? This is the solution. Beats the hell out of the caucus system to boot.

For those voters who do not have Internet access, they can both register and vote in the three day period at Internet voting stations set up by their precinct captains. These can be at a local library, school, church, or even a home.

The Democratic Nominee is decided via the popular vote of the entire country. Everyone’s votes are counted equally.

A Democratic National Conference will be held in the summer. Yes, a conference and not a convention. A conference like Yearly Kos/Netroots Nation or SxSW, but much, much bigger. Keynote speakers will be our Presidential and Vice-Presidential Nominees. The Democratic Party should take over an entire city for a weekend. Activists from all fifty states are free to come, not to be delegates, but to attend sessions, network with fellow activists, and of course, party. Strategy can be planned for the upcoming fall races. Money can be raised.

Conclusion

I’ve purposefully left the details of the online voting system vague, because by 2016 we don’t know exactly what form it may take. But keeping it open-source and run by the DNC will keep its integrity. The primary process should be about choosing the best candidate while building the party. I think the proposals above accomplish that.

Of course, these are just a few ideas. Many are a radical departure from how things are today, but all are grounded in common sense. What do you think?