Phone banks using newest technology to reach potential voters

With the California presidential primary just hours away, candidates’ supporters are giving one last big push to get people to the polls to vote.

The phone bank at the Democratic Headquarters of the Desert is trying to get people to vote for former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Over the weekend, the group made more than 9,000 calls on behalf of the Clinton campaign.

“We were hosting Bernie Sanders for quite a long time and it basically came down to who called in first and wanted the headquarters,” said Elle Kurpiewski, the office manager of the Democratic Headquarters of the Desert.

The Clinton campaign jumped on the opportunity to give their volunteers a place to work out of. Sanders supporters are certainly doing the same thing in other locations across the state.

These volunteers are using the newest technology to reach as many potential voters as possible.

“They are being able to do this off of a computer, off of laptops, and the phone calls are quite rapid. We did 1,000 phone calls just for Greg Rodriguez out of this office,” said Kurpiewski. Rodriguez is running for California State Assembly.

“We actually have online or virtual phone banking, which is very high-tech, the data is real time, and it is interesting for us to have learned all this as well,” said Jennifer McCarron, the volunteer phone bank coordinator for Clinton’s campaign in the desert.

Some of these volunteers are not used to using tablets like iPads. Others are using this technology to make calls from home and never need to physically come to a phone bank location.

This particular phone bank has supporters making calls for incumbent congressman Dr. Raul Ruiz and for Rodriguez, who is running for State Assembly. The Democratic Headquarters of the Desert has not picked a candidate to support to fill Barbara Boxer’s Senate seat.

“They are doing most of that calling out of Los Angeles, San Francisco, and San Diego. We are concentrating, because of the way this campaign has been going, locally. For us, our No. 1 ticket is Greg Rodriguez,” said Kurpiewski.

Our station tried to see if Republicans supporters were manning the phones to get voter support for their candidates, but we were not able to get in contact with them.

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