Voter Registration Palooza
Voter Registration Palooza 2026 is Make Government Work PAC's push to hold thousands of volunteer-run registration events across Texas in the last days before the October 5 deadline. An event is whatever a deputized volunteer can carry: a table on a street corner, a clipboard outside a theater, a chair in a front yard.
B-59 built the site the campaign runs on. Four pages in English and Spanish, two counts the organizers keep in a spreadsheet, and a list of who else is in — live within a week of the brief, and edited since without a deploy.
What we did
- Gave each page one question to answer: what the Palooza is, how to get certified as a Deputy Voter Registrar, what the law allows at a table, and who else has signed on. Nobody browses a campaign site in the week before a deadline.
- Wired the running counts and the endorser list to the campaign's own spreadsheets — no CMS and no deploy to change a number or add a name. The endorser list reads its sheet through the Sheets API, so an edit shows up in about ten seconds.
- Designed the failure so a visitor never meets it. A sheet that is missing, unshared, or malformed renders zeros and a written empty state instead of an error. The site does not explain our plumbing to a volunteer.
- Built it in English and Spanish from the first commit, with a test that fails the build when the two catalogs drift apart. Dates are stored once and formatted in the reader's language, so moving a deadline is one line and it is right in both.
- Reproduced the Texas political advertising disclosure verbatim and left it untranslated — it is prescribed language, not copy. The pages carrying eligibility law say in Spanish that the English is authoritative, and link it.
- Pinned the palette's contrast with a test that reads the color tokens out of the stylesheet, and checked the site where the volunteers are: 375px wide, 44px targets, no sideways scroll.
Why we built this
A registration deadline is a hard edge — the work is worth nothing on October 6. Everything the site had to do, it had to do for someone reading on a phone, standing up, with a week left: find the training, learn what is legal at the table, and sign up. So it is four pages, and the numbers move without anyone waiting on us.
It is a PAC's site and it is partisan on purpose. That is the client's message, and our job is to make it land rather than to add ours — what we bring is the part that is the same on every civic project we take. The law stated accurately. Spanish treated as a language rather than a switch. The whole thing legible on the phone it will actually be read on.