* David Ormsby dug up a memo from House Speaker Michael Madigan to Democrats dated October 31st. The memo included details of the “Sporadic Voter Program,” which was designed to increase turnout…

Turning out Democratic voters who have a history of voting in presidential elections, but who did not vote in the 2010 election cycle, could prove to be a major key to victory for Democrats in 2014, particularly in close races.

Polling:
We began the sporadic voter program with polling to determine what issues would motivate sporadic voters to get to the polls during an off-year election cycle and which sporadic voters we could most easily motivate to come to the polls.

Mail:
Given the makeup of the sporadic universe, it was determined that the best way to specifically target these voters was to send mail directly to each voter. Our mail program focused on 4 distinct groups of voters:

* Chicago minority universe: 5 pieces to 177,228 households, targeting 195,958 individuals within these households. Overall, we mailed 886,140 pieces to this universe.
* Universe outside Personal PAC birth control universe: 5 pieces, including one social pressure piece, to 103,015 households, targeting 127,938 individuals within these households. Overall, we mailed 515,075 pieces to this universe.
* Downstate universe: 7 pieces to 56,418 households, targeting a total of 63,872 individuals within these households. Overall, we mailed 394,926 pieces to this universe.
* Statewide universe: 3 pieces, including one social pressure letter, to a universe of 324,204 households, targeting a total of 377,461 voters within these households. Overall, we mailed 972,612 pieces to this universe.

In total, we sent 2,768,753 pieces of mail for the campaign.

Digital:
Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Pandora as well as video and display ads were matched from the voter file… The advertising has resulted in more than 79 million impressions to date, … including 5 million views of our television commercials online. By Election Day there will be more than 120 million impressions to our targeted universe.

None of it worked.

* But there’s something that Madigan and other Democrats appear to have overlooked. The Chicago Board of Elections is obviously woefully underfunded.

Remember the tales of one to two-hour waits during early voting? There’s no better way to depress turnout than making people stand in line for two hours. Lots and lots of people just don’t have the patience or commitment to endure something like that.

Mayor Emanuel, members of the city council and many others were enraged by the GOP robocall effort that they believed caused lots of Republican election judges to skip election day, thereby causing confusion and long lines.

OK, maybe that happened, maybe not. But the hard truth is there are always long lines on election day in the city. The Board typically recruits and trains 10,000 judges or so. They need more judges to speed up the process.

People ride by the polling place in the morning and see long lines and can’t vote because they’ll be late for work. They wait until after work and see even longer lines and just give up and go home.

* And remember the city’s same-day registration/voting problems? Some people waited in line until 3 o’clock in the morning to vote. Who knows how many more saw those lines and walked away.

Why did this happen? Well, the new state law mandated a minimum number of same day polling places. Cook County opened far more than the minimum requirements and didn’t have the sort of problems faced by Chicago, which operated at the bare minimum level.

* In contrast, there’s almost never a line at my polling place. This year, three people were waiting in front of me and I was astonished. If the line had snaked out the front door and wrapped around the building, as it often does in Chicago, I probably wouldn’t have voted and made a mental note to vote early or by mail next time.

I absolutely hate long lines. This goes back to the days when my parents worked for the Department of Defense overseas and we were forced to wait in endless lines to buy just about anything or to accomplish any government-related task. I told myself I would never, ever work for the federal government when I grew up. No more lines!

I cannot possibly be alone in this.

So, Speaker, Mayor, City Council, whomever, if you want more people to vote in Chicago next time, find more money to hire more judges and open more polling places to reduce the freakishly long lines.

This ain’t rocket science!

/rant