I remember the first time I heard the word "precinct" within the political sphere. I remember thinking to myself that the word precinct only seemed to come to mind with the area of responsibility for police officers.

While I don't know if these maps accurately reflect the boundary lines for police officers, they do represent areas of responsibility throughout the county. As I've stated, every county across the country has slightly different breakdown. I believe the state level puts out overall rules and procedures but the counties have some level of autonomy to do what they feel is correct.

The way Florida is broken down, within precincts in each of the 67 counties, for every 1,000 registered voters (party affiliation does not matter) you can have one precinct committeeman (PCM) and one precinct committeewoman (PCW). The county Supervisor of Elections (SOEs) are the ones who determine how the lines are drawn for the precincts. They also redistrict more often than the state and National redistricting lines (which take place every 10 years after the census.)

This is why this matters... nearly every single county in this country is operating at 50% of potential bodies than is needed to reach voters. There is a way to figure this out if your SOE puts out the statistical data. You first have to figure out how many precincts your county has. Get a list and put them all into an excel spreadsheet. This next part is a bit tedious, but you're going to need to look at how many registered voters in each precinct and write that down in another column.

Once you've done that, you need to figure out how many PCMs/PCWs you can have in each precinct. Create a new column and go through each precinct and figure out how many PCMs you can have. Then copy that column and paste it into another column. If you are good with excel you can then use a formula to figure out how many of each you can have.

If you've got a list of current active members with their precinct numbers, you can actually go in and add a number for each of them into each precinct in yet another row. This will allow you to create a formula to figure out percentages filled within each precinct as well as total number of bodies represented in a precinct and how many people you have compared to how many you can have.

This is HUGE for knowing where you actually stand. You can see your strengths and you can see your weaknesses. You can see what overall areas you've got covered and where you're going to need to send people once your areas are done.

To put this in perspective.. Right now, going into the 2022 Midterms, we've got about 40-60 people trying to somehow reach 900k voters. This is an insurmountable task. Where we can and will be going into the 2024 election is having 2,250 people reaching about 400 voters each. It gets even easier if each of those 2,250 people has a pocket of about 2-3 volunteers.

You easily cover your voter base and you're able to reach more of the moderates and light Democrats. I've been at this for a year now and I've been frustrated because I've been roadblocked on accomplishing this. Going into 2023, this will become priority number 1. When only 30% of your voting base turns out, just think of what the races will look like when you can get 50%, 60%, 70% in each precinct to turn out.

How does that happen? There is software that tells you who HAS and who HAS NOT voted yet. You can literally go and knock on the doors of people who have not yet voted. You making that constant touch point really makes the difference. We can and will win all races going forward when we can make this happen.

There are a lot of other things that can happen as well when this team is put in place. Increased voter registration, increased fundraising, increased awareness and more benefits come when there is a well oiled machine in place.

In the near future we will talk about what an Area Leader is and how you can start to build a natural infrastructure to pass information. Stay tuned for that in a future post.

-Jeff