What We Learned from the Elections
November 27, 2018   Dave Lewis

With the 2018 election mercifully in the rear-view mirror, we’d like to reflect a bit on what we saw and learned during a very busy election season. Mail is a huge part of elections! Just in October, SnailWorks tracked more than 150,000,000 pieces of campaign mail.  Every day we were getting tens of millions of IV scans – one day we had more than 140 million scans.  In one day. Mailers and agencies are using IV to prove they have met commitments.  A lot of the election mail we tracked was contracted by agencies, and often that was subcontracted to other agencies, and finally to mail service providers.  Keeping track of all of that, and making sure commitments were met was where SnailWorks and Informed Visibility came in.  We were able to provide visibility to all of the parties up and down the line.    Vote-by-mail and ballot tracking will be critical in the future. Among other projects, we were proud to provide absentee ballot tracking for a major city and its surrounding county.  By printing a unique IMb on each return envelope, they were able to scan each piece received to confirm when it was delivered, and what path it followed making sure it was a valid vote.  Informed Visibility will play an important role in protecting the integrity of voting. Share Mail made voter registration drives more effective and totally trackable. Share Mail (or, by its catchier name “Alternative Postage”) is an alternative to business reply mail that allows your recipient to return a voter registration form to their local election officials without needing to affix postage.  It is driven by a unique IMb on each piece that allows postage to be charged, and allows the mail to be tracked.  Now you can measure the response to voter registration efforts. Flat mail is now very trackable. Election mail tends to be flat-size mail pieces, sent in very high density mailings.  In the last election we really couldn’t track them in a meaningful way.  In this year’s election we were able to track them very successfully!  While we are still not at the 95% - 99% we see on letter-size mail, we were still able to track a high percentage of flat mail – generally 60% - 80% tracked to delivery, and over 90% receiving at least one scan.  This was a huge improvement, and the Informed Visibility program is hard at work making flats tracking even more effective. In the end, SnailWorks and our clients had a very successful election season.  We can’t wait until the next election!  …well, maybe we can…  

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