Jason Hoekstra

Atlas Voter Protection

November 2008 PHP MySQL Campaign Tech Rapid Development Voter Protection

Nationwide election-day operations platform for the 2008 Obama campaign, coordinating legal volunteers and tracking voter protection issues across 18+ states. Replaced Google Spreadsheets with real-time attorney assignment system.

The Challenge

Early voter-protection efforts relied on Google spreadsheets, which did not scale to national, real-time election operations. The campaign needed a centralized system to intake issues from call centers, assign and track attorneys across precincts, and coordinate legal response during active elections. The solution had to scale rapidly from state pilots to a multi-state national deployment under extreme time pressure.

Role & Ownership

  • Technical Lead & Program Lead
  • Conceived the system architecture and overall solution
  • Led rapid prototyping, technical design, and implementation
  • Coordinated contractors, vendors, volunteer technologists, and graphic designer
  • Managed deployment, operations, and last-mile data readiness leading into Election Day
  • Worked directly with legal experts to ensure workflows aligned with real-world voter protection needs

Technical Approach

Designed and built a help-desk-style legal issue tracking and assignment system.

Core Capabilities:

  • Intake of voter protection issues from call centers
  • Assignment and routing of issues to attorneys
  • Polling place and precinct-based organization
  • Role-based access control
  • Filtering and query-driven views
  • Basic mapping integrations contributed by other campaign teams

Rollout:

  • Piloted in New Mexico, Texas, and Pennsylvania during the primary
  • Rapidly expanded to nationwide platform covering 18+ states for the general election
  • Mass data imports in final days: attorney rosters, issue categories, precinct assignments

Key Results

  • Scaled voter protection from ad hoc spreadsheets to a national, real-time system
  • Supported hundreds of legal volunteers coordinating across states and precincts
  • Enabled faster issue triage and attorney assignment on Election Day
  • Operated without scalability or reliability issues despite rapid growth
  • Became a critical operational component of the 2008 Obama campaign’s voter protection effort

Additional Contributions

  • Built custom .NET voter file import process that saved the campaign over $100,000 in consulting costs
  • Managed technology operations across the Midwest, Southwest, and Great Lakes regions

Technologies

PHP, MySQL, Role-Based Access Control, Mass Data Import, Election Operations