Almost everyone who skips elections lives within ten doors of someone who never misses a general election. That is not a slogan -- it is the measured shape of ten precincts in a North Carolina county. So we stopped building routes for strangers to drive to, and started handing one neighbor the ten households nearest her own front door.
We took ten precincts in Halifax County, North Carolina, and asked a narrow question: if every resident who has voted the last three general elections walked only the ten households closest to her, who would that reach? The answer turned out to be nearly everybody worth reaching.
The consequence is that the hard part of turnout stops being a logistics problem. Nobody has to be recruited into a car, assigned a stranger's street, or supervised across a county. The walk is already short. What was missing was the piece of paper telling one person which ten doors are hers.
A block captain is not a volunteer slot. She is someone who has turned out for every general election since 2020, who says yes to the ten households nearest her own -- unpaid, nonpartisan, and nobody she has to drive to.
Twelve pages, built for her block and no one else's: her ten doors, who lives behind each one, and one line on what to say.
The map uses her street names and her house numbers. The furthest door is the one at the end of the block she already walks past.
One page on how to have the conversation, and a card with the four questions that turn a yes into a ballot actually cast.
Every real packet carries neighbors' names, addresses and voting histories, so it goes nowhere but the captain's hands. This one is built from an invented precinct by the same software, with nothing changed but the database it reads. No email, no form.
PDF · 12 pages · no email required
If you vote in every general election and you'd walk the ten houses closest to yours, tell us where you live and we will build your packet. It costs you nothing and it is not a party job.
The recruitment rate is the one number nobody has measured, and the trial that measures it is a few thousand dollars of mail. The design is written and the county is picked.