Precinct chair tools

Precinct chair is a membership role, alongside candidate, campaign manager, staff, and volunteer. It only exists on group-type workspaces: a county or state party, a PAC, or a coalition. An individual candidate's campaign has no chair structure, and the chair pages return not-found there by design. A chair is volunteer-tier for data access, which means every rule that applies to a volunteer applies to a chair, plus a small set of precinct-scoped powers layered on top.

Each chair is tied to exactly one precinct, set by a manager when the person is invited or when their role is changed. That precinct is the boundary for everything the role can do: which voters they see, which lists they can generate walks from, which volunteers they can assign, and what a granted export contains.

A chair's sidebar has the dashboard, My Precinct, Walks, Team, Leaderboard, Events, and Outdoor. It does not have Voters, Query, Lists, Areas, Tags, Outreach, Fundraising, or any export page, and the server enforces that: those pages return not-found to a chair even by direct link. A chair always sees at least what a volunteer sees; anywhere the app would show a chair less than a volunteer is treated as a bug and tested against.

My Precinct is the voter search pinned to the chair's precinct. The standard filter bar is available, but the precinct is forced server-side; filters can narrow within it and can never widen past it. A chair with no precinct assigned yet sees an empty state telling them to ask a manager, never the unscoped file. There is no per-voter detail panel, no tag button (chairs cannot tag), and no CSV button unless a manager has granted one.

Team shows the chair their precinct's cohort: the volunteers scoped to the same precinct. Walks shows walks they created, walks they are assigned to, and walks an assigned walker from their precinct is on, up to 2,000 rows so a county with hundreds of turfs does not silently hide any. In the app, a chair has the volunteer tab bar, including the Signs tab.

A manager invites a chair by email with a precinct number, or changes an existing member's role to precinct chair and sets the precinct. Only a candidate or campaign manager can hand out the chair role; a chair cannot make another chair. Changing someone's role clears any export grant they held, so a staffer moved to chair, or a chair moved anywhere else, starts clean.

The Chairs page (managers only) is the county chair's Monday-morning view: every chair, their precinct or a warning that none is set, how many volunteers are scoped to that precinct, canvass progress across the precinct's walks as visited over total stops, and when they were last active. Clicking a chair opens a read-only detail page with their volunteers and their walks; the roster deliberately shows names and activity only, no contact details.

From My Precinct, a chair applies whatever filters they want and taps Build a walk list to save a static list. That list is theirs, and it is the only kind of list they can generate walks from. When they open Generate, the wizard lists only their own lists, and the server re-checks two things before it clusters anything: the list was created by them, and every voter on it is in their current precinct. If either fails, generation is refused. A chair whose precinct assignment was cleared cannot generate at all.

Generated walks default to Hand-assigned, so they never appear in the county-wide claim pool by accident. On a walk the chair created, the walk page shows stops and progress without any per-door detail, and one staffing control: Assign a walker. The picker offers volunteers scoped to the chair's precinct, volunteers with no precinct set (treated as county-wide help), and other chairs. It never offers staff or managers, and never a volunteer scoped to a different precinct. The same rule is re-checked on the server for every click, and it applies only to walks the chair created; one chair cannot staff another chair's turf.

Assigning sends the walker a push notification, and the confirmation says plainly if the person has no phone registered. The chair can remove a walker they added, change the walk's priority and scheduled date, and switch it between Knock & Talk and Door Hanger until someone starts it. They can move their own walks through the status lifecycle but cannot delete a walk, open a results page, or export results. The walk mechanics themselves are on the block walking page.

A chair can invite volunteers by email or by a share link, and every invite they create is scoped to their precinct: the new volunteer arrives already assigned to it and shows up in the chair's Team view. A chair cannot invite staff, managers, or other chairs. Because unscoped volunteers are available to every chair, a manager can also leave a general pool unscoped and let chairs draw from it as needed.

By default a chair cannot download anything. A manager can grant export per chair from the Team page (Data export in the chair's row). With the grant, an Export CSV button appears on My Precinct. The export is forced to the chair's precinct on the server, carries the same columns as the table view (with has-phone and has-email flags rather than the raw phone or email), and always excludes voters no longer on the county roll. Filters the chair applied narrow the export; nothing widens it.

The grant is stored under its own permission key that the staff permissions panel cannot write, so a stale staff-era checkbox can never pre-enable a real download when someone is reassigned. It is cleared on every role change and on removal. Every export is logged with the campaign, the chair, the precinct, and the row count.

Forty chairs, one workspace. The county party creates a party-type workspace, invites 40 chairs with their precinct numbers, and each chair invites their own volunteers. On the Chairs page the county chair sees within a week which precincts have five volunteers and which have none, and which chairs have not logged in since the training.

The chair's Saturday. A chair filters My Precinct to voters who voted in two of the last three primaries, saves 310 voters as a list, generates by precinct at 100 stops per walk (three walks), assigns two to volunteers and one to herself, and walks hers from the app. Every answer lands on the voter records under the party's workspace, and the Chairs page shows her precinct at 62 percent by Sunday.

Coordinated candidates. The party runs the chairs; each supported candidate has their own workspace. A chair who also volunteers for a council candidate has two memberships on one account and switches between them, with neither workspace seeing the other's data. The rest of the mechanics are on the county party page.

Precinct organization is the oldest ground-game structure there is, and it has mostly run on paper because no affordable tool could give a chair a real voter list without giving them the whole county. The scoped role solves that: chairs get enough to work their streets, the county keeps control of the file, and every knock rolls up to one place. What a precinct chair is explains the role in party terms; how many votes it takes to win is the arithmetic that makes a 40-precinct program worth running, and the door-knocking guide is what to hand each chair.

The role is deliberately narrow. These are the edges:

• It is not available on individual candidate campaigns; chairs exist only on party, PAC, and coalition workspaces.
• A chair never sees voters outside their precinct, the AI voter query, county-wide lists, outreach, or fundraising.
• Chairs cannot use the pin-drop custom walk builder or manage flyers; both can reach outside the precinct.
• Chairs cannot delete walks, view walk results, or export results. Export of the precinct table is by grant only.
• Precinct assignment is manual per member; there is no automatic assignment from a volunteer's home address.
• Chairs cannot invite other chairs or staff, and cannot tag voters.
• Drawn targeting areas are staff and above; a chair builds lists from filters, not shapes.

The chair role is a scoped window onto features the rest of the party uses in full:

• Block walking: generation, assignment, and the results writeback the chair's walks feed.
• Volunteer coordination: invites, share links, roles, and the precinct-scoped Team view.
• Volunteer mobile app: the chair and their volunteers walk from the same app.
• Yard signs and field assets: flag houses filtered by precinct become a chair's walk list.
• Compliance and data security: the row-level isolation the scoping rests on.