Block walking

A walk is a named route of stops carved from one saved voter list. Every stop is a household: a single street address, the registered voters at it, and a short profile of each (party bucket, age band, top issues where the file has them) that the walker sees before knocking. A walk also carries a script, a survey, a canvass mode, an eligibility mode, and optionally a flyer, a group name, a priority, and a scheduled date.

Two canvass modes decide what happens at the door. Knock & Talk means the walker knocks, follows the script, and records a survey. Door Hanger Only means every stop is drop-and-go: no knocking, no survey, one tap to mark the hanger dropped. You can change the mode on a walk until someone starts it; after that it locks, so recorded answers stay attached to the instrument they were collected with.

The generate wizard runs in three steps: Source, Configure, Preview. In Source you pick a saved voter list (a precinct chair sees only lists they created). In Configure you set how the list is split. Proximity carves geographic blobs and names each one after the neighborhood attribute that covers most of its stops. Voter precinct makes one walk per precinct, sub-splitting any precinct larger than the target and grouping voters with no precinct value into a clearly labeled Unassigned precinct walk.

The target stops per walk slider runs from 30 to 500 and defaults to 150; the wizard warns above 150 that this is a long shift for one walker. It is a target, not a hard cap, because a blob keeps a neighborhood together. No maximum puts the whole list in one route. Proximity blobs also stop growing once the nearest remaining household is more than 1,500 meters away, so a spread-out list becomes several tight walks instead of one route that spans the county.

Preview shows every walk it will create, how many stops each has, and what it excluded: households with no stored coordinates, households that fail the walkability gate (next section), geographic outliers farther than 2.5 km or four times the median distance from the list's center, and households already knocked on an in-progress or completed walk from the same list. Only stops that were actually visited count as already walked, so regenerating from a half-finished list picks up the untouched doors.

When you confirm, every walk is created in Ready status with the campaign's active survey and script attached, stops ordered by a nearest-neighbor pass with 2-opt cleanup, and a walker cap of 50. If no survey is active, the wizard warns you first, because a walk without one records outcomes but no answers.

Every household on a generated walk has to pass three tests. The voter's registration ID must be on the latest county master roll loaded into the system. The address must exist in the county appraisal district's parcel roll, matched strictly first and then loosely, so a vendor address missing its street-type suffix (63 Asbury Park for 63 Asbury Park Ct) still matches. And the address must never have been flagged Wrong address by a walker in the field.

The gate exists because a walker was once routed to a house that did not exist. It applies to walk generation and to list membership, and it is enforced in the database rather than only in the app, so a new code path cannot quietly reopen it. Voters who fail it can still be seen and badged in search; they just never become a stop. The third test is self-healing: one walker marking a wrong address removes that address from every future walk.

Managers and staff also get a Custom walk builder: drop a pin on the map to set a starting point, pick a source (an imported list or a recent query session), optionally exclude reliable partisans (voters who cast four or more of the last five primary ballots and four or more of the last five general ballots), and carve a single walk with an estimated walk time. Precinct chairs do not get this builder, because it can carve anywhere on the map.

Any walk can be split into 2 to 24 parts from its detail page. Even split cuts equal chunks in route order. Odd / Even puts the two sides of the street on two walks. Draw areas lets you draw one polygon per resulting walk on the map; stops inside each polygon go to that walk, stops outside every polygon go to the nearest one, and no stop is dropped. Visit state carries onto the parts, so splitting a half-walked route does not lose marks. A walk shared with another campaign has to be un-shared first.

Densify adds door-hanger neighbors on the same streets as an existing walk's stops for a whole-block literature drop, and a printable walkbook is one click away for anyone who prefers paper.

Each walk has one of three eligibility modes. Admin assigned, the default for generated walks: only walkers you explicitly assign can see it. Open to all: any volunteer on the campaign can claim it from the app with one tap. Targeted list: only the volunteers you pick on the walk's eligibility panel can claim it. Eligibility is locked while a walk is in progress.

You assign from the walk detail page or in bulk from the walks list. Assigning fires a push notification to the walker's phone; if they have no phone registered, the confirmation says so, because otherwise you would believe they had been told. Claiming is serialized in the database so two volunteers cannot both take the last slot. The walker cap applies to hand-assigned and targeted walks; open walks are uncapped. When the last walker declines, the walk reverts to Ready and is claimable again.

Several walkers on one walk share it as split coverage: each door is marked once, by whoever gets there first, and the app shows combined progress. Two walkers filling out separate surveys at the same door is not supported. You can also copy a tokenized walker link that opens the walk in a phone browser, and share a walk with another campaign for a joint canvass.

A walk moves through Draft, Ready (published), Assigned, In progress, Completed, and Canceled. Generated walks start at Ready. Assigning a draft moves it to Assigned; a walker tapping Start moves it to In progress. The status chip on the list is a dropdown, and the server enforces which moves are legal:

Only a truly empty draft hard-deletes. A walk with any recorded data soft-deletes instead, and only a campaign manager or candidate can do that, typing the walk's name to confirm; staff cancel. Auto-complete closes the loop: when the last stop on a walk is marked, the walk flips to Completed and results are written back. The flip is a conditional update, so two walkers finishing at once cannot double-write, and it can never fail a walker's mark.

• Draft can go to Ready or Canceled. Ready and Assigned can go back to Draft, forward to In progress, or to Canceled.
• In progress can only go to Completed or Canceled.
• Completed is final. Canceled can be reopened to Draft.
• A walk with recorded field data (knocked doors or survey answers) can never be moved back to Draft. Cancel it instead; canceling keeps the data.

Each walk has a Results page: visited count, home-and-engaged rate, no-answer and other outcomes, and a table of every stop with its outcome, the voters at it, their survey answers, and the walker's note. Staff and above can export it as CSV. The Live map shows walkers moving through the turf while they are active, and a Needs attention notice flags any field write the server rejected.

On completion, the writeback stamps campaign-scoped annotations on every voter at every visited stop: the stop status and the walker's note for the household, plus receptiveness, supports-candidate, intends-to-vote, and free-text response where a walker recorded them. Party and modeled fields are never overwritten. Stops marked Wrong address or Moved away go to a reconciliation queue for staff review. Custom survey answers reach the voter file through their own key mapping, described on the scripts and surveys page, and all of it becomes filterable in search and the AI voter query.

City council, 4,200 target voters. The list resolves to roughly 1,800 households: about 12 walks at the default 150 stops, each a full shift for one walker or an afternoon for two. Six Saturday volunteers take two each, assigned Friday night, and each phone buzzes.

School board door-hanger weekend. 900 households, Door Hanger Only, target 60 stops, Open to all. That is 15 short routes any volunteer can claim from the app on the way over. Each stop is one tap; the walks auto-complete as they finish, and Monday morning the manager sees which blocks were covered.

County party precinct chair. A chair builds a list from My Precinct, generates by Voter precinct at 100 stops per walk (three walks), and assigns her precinct's volunteers from the walk page. The chair's side is on the precinct chair tools page.

Door knocking is the one contact method a local campaign can run at scale for the cost of volunteers' time, and it is the method with the strongest evidence behind it. The door-knocking guide covers what the research says and how to plan a program; how many votes it takes to win helps size the universe you should be cutting into walks. What generation adds is that nobody hand-cuts turf in a spreadsheet, nobody walks to an address that is not there, and what walkers learn at the door is on the voter record before the next mailer goes out.

These boundaries are deliberate; most trace back to a field incident.

• It does not geocode at build time. Households without stored coordinates are skipped and counted in the preview; fix the address data first.
• It does not support paired walking (two walkers, two surveys, one door). Multiple walkers on one walk split the doors, and the newest mark on a stop wins.
• Split is capped at 24 parts, and a walk shared with another campaign must be un-shared before splitting.
• Route order is computed point to point on the server; the app draws a road-following line to the next door but there is no turn-by-turn navigation inside it. Open in Maps hands the exact coordinates to your phone's map app.
• Auto-complete only fires when every stop is marked. A walk left with three untouched doors stays open until staff mark it complete or cancel it.
• The read-only Walk API (walk list and stops, paged by cursor) is in beta and enabled per campaign by request.

The features that feed walks and consume their results:

• Volunteer mobile app: where walkers claim, navigate, and mark stops, on or off signal.
• Scripts and surveys: the words at the door and the questions whose answers map onto the voter file.
• Search, lists, and tags: every walk starts from a saved list, and walk annotations become filters.
• Volunteer coordination: invites, roles, and the leaderboard that scores doors and surveys.
• Precinct chair tools: chairs generate and staff walks inside their own precinct.
• Yard signs and field assets: flag houses become a list, and a list becomes a walk.