I built a service on top of EC2/Asterisk that did political phone polling. Not really polling though as much as voter ID, we'd push out 100,000 calls into a congressional district and campaigns would use the resulting data for targeted mail and GOTV. It was all point and click-- write your poll and record it with a flash plugin-- stupidly simple. After the 2008 election I shut it down, largely due to getting to work with so many politicians and realizing how totally worthless human beings most of them are. Seriously, how the fuck these people are writing laws is beyond me.<p>And yeah, the laws are total bullshit. If I revive the project my plan is to have a massive list of phone numbers as well as a list of congressman's offices, personal cell phones, children's cell phone numbers, mistresses, etc. Whenever an important vote comes up you call your people and give them a very short briefing on the issue and then connect the call through to the appropriate number. Because you can control the call throttling you can lock up phone lines and it would be about 100x more effective than traditional calling campaigns. Ron Paul 2012.