This weekend I got looped in with this team that was working on a vote swapping initiative. This is where people in swing states (where votes matter more for the electoral college) agree to vote for Kamala, in exchange for people in "safe" blue states voting for their protest vote of choice. So a Free Palestine voter in Pennsylvania, agrees to vote for Harris if, say, 2 Californians agree to vote for Jill Stein (or whatever, I hope this can be a thread about technology and the electorate, not about politics).
The net result is that they can cast a vote against fascism in their home (swing) state It's a weird hack, but it works.
After passing through a google sheets prototyping phase, and a phase where we thought we might fork the UK site (which funnily enough has the domain at swapMYvote.org), we decided our quickest path to scale was to throw something together with Fillout and Airtable.
I'm not a stranger to low-code, but I'm often a high-code guy, so it's been an eye-opening process building something like this on such a short time scale. We had literally a dozen days between the first scalable-ish version, and the election. On one hand, it's incredible to be able to schedule a new automated email, based on complex logic, in a couple minutes - the time it often takes me to deploy a single changeset. On the other hand, the testing tools aren't quite what you need, to make sure you don't break anything important. It also makes a big difference to your scaling speed when you have an outreach team that knows what they're doing. We've gone from zero to oh-no-gmail-wont-let-us-send-more-emails in an incredibly short time.
