Our land-line telephone received at least six calls each day for two months, from political organizations representing candidates at the federal, state, and local levels. We never answer that phone, only let the answering machine take the call and return it in the very rare event it is someone "real". But we did not get calls on election day because we live in a state (CA) that both parties assumed (correctly) would give a majority to the President.

"Get out the vote" operations (GOTV) are real and sometimes effective in states where the outcome is expected to be close. In this election there were a small number of these "swing" states where both parties thought they had a chance to win.

In such states, if the early indications are that the voting is close, the party organization can redouble its efforts to contact known supporters (contributors, or merely people who are registered to that party in the public records, or people who have signed a petition or gotten on the party mailing list somehow) and persuade them to vote.

(This is because in the USA, unlike some countries, it is not mandatory to vote, and rarely do even half the eligible voters do so. So if you can persuade a person who was not planning to vote, to do so, that is a net gain of 1 vote.)

The purpose of this "Orca" system was to collate the reports from volunteers watching the polling places and identify precincts where a few extra votes might make a difference.

You can see how serious the effort was, in that the Republicans had mustered 37,000 volunteers willing to do this sort of thankless work: to stand around polling places, politely asking people how they had voted and phone in the counts; or, sit in an office and make telephone calls to people who do not want to be called and politely urge them to go and vote. That is a large effort, and apparently wasted by poor planning.

There are very few countries where voting is mandatory, perhaps none. And still The USA has lower voter turnout than most, probably more because of the separate registration step than anything else.

But the biggest difference is the per-state first pas the post mechanism, which is what creates the phenomenon of "swing states" where relatively few voter decide everything, and almost any expense of effort by campaigns is worthwhile.

Voting is mandatory in Australia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electoral_system_of_Australia#...

Historically intensive voter contact operations are only cultural acceptable in countries that weren't largely occupied by either the Fascists or the Communists.

So basically it is UK (less Northern Ireland), US, Canada, Australia and a few others. An Italian friend once said to me that if anyone knocked on his door asking how he voted he would stall them at the door, whilst trying to jump out the back window and get away over the hills...