VOIP + Cloud = Better Political Campaigns

I built a service on top of EC2/Asterisk that did political phone polling. Not really polling though as much as voter ID, we'd push out 100,000 calls into a congressional district and campaigns would use the resulting data for targeted mail and GOTV. It was all point and click-- write your poll and record it with a flash plugin-- stupidly simple. After the 2008 election I shut it down, largely due to getting to work with so many politicians and realizing how totally worthless human beings most of them are. Seriously, how the fuck these people are writing laws is beyond me.

And yeah, the laws are total bullshit. If I revive the project my plan is to have a massive list of phone numbers as well as a list of congressman's offices, personal cell phones, children's cell phone numbers, mistresses, etc. Whenever an important vote comes up you call your people and give them a very short briefing on the issue and then connect the call through to the appropriate number. Because you can control the call throttling you can lock up phone lines and it would be about 100x more effective than traditional calling campaigns. Ron Paul 2012.

Political calling is one of few areas you could build something like this and get away with it.

In any type of business-to-consumer calling you're going to need to hire a lawyer before you even design the system because of all the telemarketing regulations (at federal, state and local levels) that have to be followed. There's lots of documentation to be prepared that you have to make available to anyone that asks while you call them, there are rules about how predictive dialers can be used (such as maximum drop call rates and dead air times), etc.

Politicians, when writing these telemarketing regulations, purposely wrote clauses into them excluding political calls. Ya know, consumers don't want to be bothered by telemarketing so our politicians actually listen and pass these laws, but it's OK for them to bother us with telemarketing still.

Last time I tried using Asterisk on Amazon EC2 the call quality was pretty bad - presumably because Asterisk's timing was being messed up by the virtualisation.

nice idea. this is a very good vertical application to build on top of http://www.twilio.com/