I recommend leaving lots of impassioned comments on blogs frequented exclusively by people who would never consider voting for a Republican anyway.

My wife and I volunteered for the DNC in 2004 to help out with the convention since it was in town. She got a crappy job standing in some random place in Boston saying hi to delegates and press who wandered by. I had a somewhat more interesting job working in the media building helping press people get set up and driving dignitaries around in a golf cart- I had access to the convention center.
Obviously these were not long-term committments since they were centered around a single event. They weren't very interesting from an activism point of view but they weren't too time-consuming either, and someone has to do the behind the scenes scut work.

How about working for local elections?

There are a bunch of candidates in need to help.

Virginia Dems could use the help.

I recommend orange post titles.

Well, someone's gotta cockblock Teo tomorrow night.

I endorse 1. I also recommend getting into heated arguments about minutia that won't affect voting behavior anyway.

Man, the 04 moveon experience really soured me on door-to-door.

MoveOn was pretty terribly run once they started in with boots on the ground. I spent the last few days with America Coming Together in Nevada, which was much better organized although not as hookuptacular as the name might suggest.

Moot; it doesn't exist. That could change, but I suspect the DNC will be doing a lot more than the 527s this year. This suspicion is groundless.

Man, the 04 moveon experience really soured me on door-to-door.

Really? Why? I had a very positive experience.

I also felt like I accomplished a lot from phone banking. A lot of it wasn't to persuade people -- just figuring out people's preferences so that we could see if they needed rides to the polls or someting -- but I thought that data collection for future targeting was valuable.

Here's what happened, Becks: we went door to door doing GOTV, which was ok, if probably not that effective. Then on election day I got up at like 4 because none of the fucking hippies in my cadre were willing to, just so I could stand at the polling place with a checklist making sure the people who said they'd vote actually voted. Haha-- they gave me the wrong list! No wonder I didn't have any luck walking up to people with my inane "are you a moveon voter?" And the haphazard organization made that sort of mistake seem like it would be easy to make.

On the other hand at the time I said nice things about moveon on the blog. Probably I'm just SO MEAN these days.

I had a bad-ish door-to-door experience with ACT in '04 (though, to be fair, the day after the election in '04 would have been one of the worst days of my life no matter what) and various campaigns in '06. Canvassing is a real needle-in-the-haystack activity... Campaigns think nothing of sending you out with disorganized, out-of-date lists of conceivably-Democratic-leaning voters. They think nothing of sending multiple volunteers to the same house on the same day. And so on... See here for more specific complaints, if you're interested.

Also, if you're busting your ass working in a competitive district, chances are good (probably > 50%) that your candidate will lose anyway. That's just the way it works.

Don't know where the OP is, but I can give a measured recommendation to Act Now NY. AFAIK, they just act as middlemen between NY volunteers and the worthy greater NY area campaigns that need them.

I talked to a guy at the laundrymat a couple of days ago who was involved with the Bronx Democratic Club. He and his group were going to be passing out flyers about people's right to vote after having been convicted of serious crimes. (Apparently in NY state, convicted felons who have done their prison time and some part of their probation time can register.) I thought that was a very worthy cause. However, he was going to be dropping in on probation centers and halfway houses and the like, and he was a giant african-american guy; this might not be the best way for me, a skinny white girl, to help out.

Sending people out with disorganized, out-of-date lists is fine (to me) if the point is for you to validate the lists. That's gotta get done at some point (and is what a lot of my phone banking was about). On the day of the election, though -- that's too late.

For all my cynicism, I still have some dreamy-eyed democracy fantasies. I can totally picture caravaning out to Hometown with a bunch of people and my mom putting everyone up in the basement (she'd totally do it!) and we all go out and win Ohio for Obama! Woo!

The one thing that I did find dispiriting and inefficient were voter registration drives. Standing outside bugging people for four hours to register maybe one or two voters? Ugh.

Sending people out with disorganized, out-of-date lists is fine (to me) if the point is for you to validate the lists.

This was absolutely, demonstrably not the point. I have never volunteered for a campaign with any feedback channel for saying, "This voter doesn't live here anymore," or, "This address doesn't exist," etc. You get a static dump of an Excel spreadsheet, typically sorted alphabetically by street name. The next volunteer will get the same dump from the same spreadsheet with no corrections.

The one thing that I did find dispiriting and inefficient were voter registration drives. Standing outside bugging people for four hours to register maybe one or two voters? Ugh.

Huh. I had a lot of fun registering voters at the Atlantic Ave street fair in '04. There were unregistered teenagers by the hundreds.

The times I did phone banking, I think you were supposed to wait until three "Voting Republican" check marks had been put by the voter before you stopped calling them.

I kept putting myself on lists of people who should be contacted for canvassing, but the whole idea made me more nervous than anything ever has in my life. I could never go through with it.

14: A good campaign will buy lists printed with a bar code. Early in the campaign, volunteers will mark "supportive", "not home", "moved/deceased" etc. and they'll winnow the lists by computer-entry so that by the time GOTV rolls around, some of the chaff is gone. Never all -- volunteer orgs won't contact everybody -- but at the very least, by the end of the campaign the lists should have markered-out houses where there are strong nos or bad addresses.

I can't recommend highly enough volunteering on a local campaign. You're much more likely to be given responsibility, and in the general, at least, it's probable that your efforts will tie in with those of the presidential candidate. Also, party-hop on election night.

12 sounds fun.

See, I think this is where knowing which organization to volunteer with comes into play. Phone banking with NYCA was extremely efficient -- they had computer programs that autodialed and everything and the lists were very good and well-targeted. With America Votes, it was literally pages copied out of a phone book (and that was the day before the election). I want to work with the people who have good data.

I want to work with the people who have good data.

Becks, aren't you a database expert or something? It would seem that you could do more good by volunteering for a technologically primitive organization or campaign and helping to set them up with proper tools. Don't hide your lamp under a bushel, girl. (Of course, this would be a more significant time commitment than spending a few hours phone banking.)

I'm with Knecht, apathy is its own reward.

For election day 2004, I got involved with an NAACP-affiliated group called "Election Protection" that was posting volunteers in black-heavy Detroit polling places to make sure nobody was intimidating voters.

Consequentialist skulduggery alert here, but if your local GOP is training volunteers to hold up lines by running frivolous challenges of voter eligibility at the polls (as is allowed in Michigan), the best thing you can do might be to infiltrate their organization, be assigned a polling place, not challenge anybody. I suspected that a GOP challenger in the precinct I was at in 2004 may have been one of our secret agents.

Election Protection was very fulfilling, by the way. It might've been more awesome if the bad guys had shown up and I'd done something to shut them down, but an uneventful day of watching people vote in huge numbers was still great.

Yeah, what I'd really like to be doing is laborious list-cleaning: "Take this giant stack of marked up printouts, and correct the database on that basis." That seems useful, and I'm better suited for it than talking to strangers. But I never seem to be able to figure out who wants that sort of work done. (Based on some very desultory looking for volunteering opportunities.)

23 - I'm the same way. Voter registration? Unfulfilling (for the reasons mentioned above). Being the person who data enters all of the information about the voters we registered before turning the forms into the Board of Elections? Totally satisfying!

11: I just want to back up that recommendation. Rah did exactly the same thing for the Democratic Party here in NC in '06 and though he had some dull days he also came home at least once with a story of someone who wept when they found out they could vote again if they filled out a specific form.

Rah and I were part of the Democratic Party's GOTV operation in Wake County (Durham County didn't need us) in '04 and I found it fun but pointless. I wasn't convinced that we'd prompted anyone to vote by ringing their doorbell even though everyone was very nice. I found being an election judge felt much more rewarding (though I'm not doing it again this specific year because of what a nightmare I imagine it to be in a presidential election). This year I'm hoping to score a gig as a driver for folks who don't otherwise have a way to the polls.