Campaign software for county party organizations

There are 19,519 municipal governments in the United States by the Census count the National League of Cities cites, plus school districts, county offices, and legislative seats layered on top. In a given cycle a county party may be supporting candidates for a dozen of them at once, most of whom have no staff. The party's job is the shared infrastructure: the precinct organization, the volunteer pool, the county-wide voter list, and the coordinated turnout program in the last three weeks.

The Committee tier is built for that shape. It includes everything in the Campaign tier plus unlimited campaigns from one workspace, cross-campaign reporting, dedicated onboarding, and SLA-backed uptime. Pricing is set after an onboarding call, and the same tier serves county and state parties, slates, PACs, and consultants running several races.

A Culper account is a person, not a login per campaign. One person can be a campaign manager on the party workspace, a volunteer on a council candidate's campaign, and a precinct chair on the county's coordinated campaign, each with its own role, and switch between them from the sidebar. The party creates its workspace as a group-type campaign (Political Party, with a county or district scope) rather than as a candidate; it has no candidate member, so its campaign managers can manage each other's roles.

Each candidate the party supports gets their own campaign workspace with their own file, lists, walks, and texting registration. The party's managers can be invited into those workspaces at whatever role the candidate chooses, and the candidate account owns billing on each. Nothing about the party workspace gives anyone a view into a candidate's workspace, or the reverse, unless a person is explicitly a member of both.

Precinct chair is a real role in Culper, not a label. It exists only on group-type workspaces (party, PAC, coalition), and a manager assigns it to a member together with a precinct number, either by invitation or by changing an existing member's role. From then on the chair has a My Precinct page: a voter search scoped to that one precinct, with a button to build a precinct list from it. What the role means in party terms is explained at /learn/what-is-a-precinct-chair.

From that list the chair can generate walks (split by proximity or, trivially, by precinct), and on their own walks they can assign volunteers and adjust settings; the server re-checks that every list they generate from stays inside their current precinct. Chairs can invite volunteers, but only into their own precinct. They see the Team page filtered to their precinct's cohort, the leaderboard, events, and the yard-sign map. They do not see the county-wide voter surfaces, outreach, or exports. CSV export of their own precinct is off by default and can be granted per chair by a manager.

Managers get a Chairs page: every chair, their precinct, how many volunteers they have recruited, canvass progress in their patch, and when they were last active. That is the county chair's Monday-morning view of the organization.

The coordinated program starts with the county-wide list. Walk generation splits it by voter precinct, so a list of 80,000 habitual voters becomes one walk per precinct in a single batch, each with a group name and a priority. Precincts with no chair can be left open for any volunteer to claim; precincts with a chair are hand-assigned to the chair's volunteers or restricted to a named list. Chairs can also generate their own walks from their precinct list without waiting for headquarters.

Walks carry a status (draft, ready, assigned, in progress, completed), a canvass mode (knock-and-talk with a script and survey, or door-hanger-only), and an optional scheduled date. The live overview map shows every walker in the county; each walk has a results page; the voters-reached report totals touches by channel and day. Walkers use the iOS or Android app or a browser link. Assignment sends a push notification to the app and nothing else, so chairs should text new walkers the first time.

The party's list usually comes from the county elections office or the state, which in most states sells the file with vote history at modest cost; the state guides at /run-for-office say who and for how much. Upload it as a CSV into the party workspace; state, VAN, and vendor formats map automatically, and it dedupes to one resolved record per voter.

Commercial extracts from L2, i360, and Aristotle are licensed per client. The party can use its own extract in its own workspace, but it cannot hand that extract to every candidate's workspace; each candidate uploads the file they are licensed for. The platform enforces that boundary rather than working around it, because a shared hub across candidates would put every campaign's license at risk.

The mechanism for working across that boundary is walk sharing, which the product calls a joint canvass. The host campaign creates a share for one walk by entering the guest campaign's dashboard link, and the guest accepts the resulting invitation; the link is single-use and expires (7 days by default, 30 at most). The guest campaign's volunteers can then claim and knock the walk. Knocks land on the host's walk, and results mirror back to the guest only for voters the guest is independently entitled to see; no vendor data or personal details are copied across.

The suppression list is global and campaign-agnostic: when any voter replies STOP to any campaign on the platform, their number is suppressed for every campaign, and no campaign can override it. Numbers are normalized to one canonical form before every check, so a number opted out as '(555) 123-4567' still matches a send to '+15551234567'. Under the Telephone Consumer Protection Act, autodialed or prerecorded texts to cell phones require prior express consent, with statutory damages of $500 per violation and up to $1,500 when willful, so the party's list discipline protects every candidate on the ballot.

10DLC registration is per workspace. Each campaign that sends texts registers its own brand and campaign through The Campaign Registry and is vetted by Campaign Verify, which verifies parties and committees registered with a state or local election authority and says it decides submissions within minutes to two business days. The party should start its own registration at onboarding and tell every endorsed candidate to do the same on day one, because sending stays disabled until the carriers approve. The rules are at /learn/political-texting-rules-tcpa-10dlc.

Every campaign-scoped table carries a campaign id and a PostgreSQL row-level security policy that checks the caller's membership before a row can be read or written. Application code filters too, but the database is the boundary, so a bug in a page cannot leak one candidate's list to another. Soft-removed members lose access immediately, and pending invites grant nothing until accepted.

The plain-English query layer never sees voter rows: the model emits a constrained query, a server-side validator checks it against an allowlist, and it runs as a read-only database role scoped to the requesting campaign, with every prompt and result count logged. When a race ends the campaign is archived: everyone who was a member keeps read access to the history, and every write is blocked. Campaigns with no activity for 180 days are archived automatically after a warning at 150. The full posture is at /security.

Because an account is a person, the party's volunteers do not need a second login to help a candidate. Invite them to the party workspace by email or share link, with the app links in the invite; when a candidate needs bodies, share the walk with the candidate's campaign or invite the volunteer there directly. The leaderboard scores doors, surveys, signs, and events per campaign, and events with GPS coordinates check volunteers in from the phone when they arrive.

A county party needs several things the product does not provide. Plan for them separately.

• It does not come with a voter file for your county. The party obtains the file from the county or state and uploads it, and each candidate uploads their own.
• It does not pool voter records across campaigns. A shared voter hub across candidates is not a feature, because commercial extracts are licensed per client; walk sharing is the supported way to work together.
• It does not sync with VAN or GOP Data Center. Export and import.
• It does not run precinct conventions, manage party bylaws, or file campaign finance reports; see /learn/campaign-finance-basics-for-local-candidates for the basics.
• It does not text anyone from any workspace until that workspace's 10DLC registration is approved.
• It does not process online donations yet. Stripe Connect payouts and embeddable donation widgets are in development; confirm timing on the onboarding call, and use Anedot, ActBlue, or WinRed for online contributions in the meantime.
• It does not plan or design mail or buy paid media. It can print and mail a designed piece to a list with a quote first, and it logs outside mail so the touch counts.
• Pricing is set after an onboarding call; the Committee tier is the fit for a county party.

1. 1.National League of Cities, Cities 101: Number of Local Governments (19,519 municipal governments)
2. 2.47 U.S.C. § 227, Telephone Consumer Protection Act, Legal Information Institute
3. 3.The Campaign Registry: 10DLC brand and campaign registration
4. 4.Campaign Verify: political sender vetting for 10DLC (eligibility and timelines)