Every other tool assumes your race looks like theirs.
A Canadian tool asks for your riding and has never heard of a state house district. An American one asks for your ward and breaks on a federal riding. Neither one has a box for a US Senate race, which has no district at all.
pplCRM asks one question when you set up your campaign: what are you running for? Every screen after that speaks the language of the answer.
One product, every North American race.
Pick the one you are contesting. It sets the word for a seat, the word for the ground underneath it, and which questions you are asked next.
| Level of government | A seat is called | The ground under it | For example |
|---|---|---|---|
| Canada — federal | Riding | Polling division | Ottawa Centre · MP |
| Canada — provincial or territorial | Riding | Polling division | Ottawa South, Ontario · MPP |
| Canada — municipal | Ward | Poll | Ward 14, Toronto · Councillor |
| United States — federal | Congressional district | Precinct | OH-3, Ohio · Representative |
| United States — state | Legislative district | Precinct | LD-12 (House), Arizona · State Representative |
| United States — local | Council district | Precinct | District 4, Phoenix · Council member |
| Something else | District | Subdivision | School board, county commission, band council · Your own title |
These are the words, not a map. For a Canadian federal riding, an Ontario or Alberta provincial riding, or a US congressional, state senate or state house district, you can select a published map and we fetch it. For everything else — municipal wards and precincts included — you import the districts your voter file already carries, upload a GeoJSON, or draw the areas yourself. All four are covered below.
An at-large seat is elected across a whole state or a whole city. pplCRM treats that as a real answer, not a blank field: the seat-name question simply stops being asked, and your organizing runs on the precincts or polls underneath.
- US Senate, elected across the state
- Governor, Attorney General, Secretary of State
- The single at-large House seat in Alaska, Delaware, North Dakota, South Dakota, Vermont and Wyoming
- Mayors, and at-large city council seats
- All of Vancouver city council
One American address is inside a congressional district and a state senate district and a state house district and a council district and a precinct, all at the same time. pplCRM stores every one of them against the household, so no level overwrites another and last year's map can sit beside this year's.
That is also why we never guess meaning from a label. In Massachusetts cities a ward is not a seat at all: it is a voting subdivision holding precincts, while Boston's council districts are different lines again. The same word, two different jobs, both stored correctly.
It speaks your language automatically.
Pick an office below and watch the households screen relabel itself. Nothing here is a setting you maintain: the word follows from the race, and the region can override it on its own. The full guide to declaring an office walks through all seven.
- Level of government
- Canada — federal
- Province, state or city
- —
- Chamber
- —
- Seat · office
- Ottawa Centre
- MP
| Address | Residents | Riding | Polling division |
|---|---|---|---|
| 214 Alder St | Elena & Marco Ramos | Ottawa Centre | PD 412 |
| 218 Alder St | Wei & Lily Chen | Ottawa Centre | PD 412 |
| 222 Alder St | Denise Cole | Ottawa Centre | PD 415 |
| 226 Alder St | Priya Natarajan | Ottawa—Vanier | PD 108 |
Riding is the default word for a Canadian federal race, and a federal race needs no province: the seat is the geography.
Alberta and Saskatchewan say constituency. Newfoundland and Prince Edward Island say district. Quebec says circonscription. New York calls a precinct an election district. You choose the province or state; the word comes with it.
If your race uses a word we did not predict, type your own and every screen uses it instead. A default that cannot be corrected is just a different kind of wrong.
Turf cutting uses the finest boundary your workspace holds for that race, so a walk list stops at the polling division or the precinct rather than sprawling across two of them. How turfs are cut, walked and printed.
Draw your own.
A boundary map reaches pplCRM in exactly four ways, and these are all of them: select a published map if your seat is a Canadian federal riding, an Ontario or Alberta provincial riding, or a US congressional, state senate or state house district; import the district columns your voter file already carries; upload a GeoJSON from your municipality's open data portal; or draw the areas yourself. No map of your city council's wards is included — that one you bring or you make.
Drawing is the one that matters most. Thousands of municipalities in both countries publish nothing you can use, or publish a PDF, and hunting for a shapefile is not a plan.
0 in more than one
Deciding which area a door falls in is arithmetic on coordinates already on file. Drawing, redrawing and dragging a corner never call a paid lookup service, so you can fix a boundary as many times as it takes. What costs money, and what does not.
You draw around the households you actually have and see immediately what falls where, instead of tracing a line in one program and discovering the result in another.
An area is just a name and a shape, so "the three neighbourhoods we are targeting" is a perfectly good map. Turfs can be bounded by it exactly like an official line. How drawing works, step by step.
Or import what you already have.
A purchased voter file usually arrives with the districts already filled in on every row. Those columns are the answer, so pplCRM takes them at face value.
A district column is a fact the file already carries, so importing it needs no address lookup at all. The rows land with their geography attached, ready to filter, list, count and export immediately. Cutting turfs additionally needs each door located on the map — that lookup is the metered, plan-gated part, spread over a daily budget. Which columns are recognized.
Upload a GeoJSON of your ward or council map, name the set, and say which property in the file holds each area's name. It becomes a normal set afterwards: you can rename an area, reshape it, or delete one that came over wrong. Files run to 20 MB and 5,000 areas per set, and a file over a limit is refused with a message naming which one. The full boundary guide.
Selected, imported, uploaded or hand-drawn, an area behaves the same everywhere afterwards: a column in the grid, a filter in a smart list, a boundary for turf cutting, and a heading in the coverage report.
Once a map is in place, every located address is placed in its area automatically — no tagging, no spreadsheet lookup — and each household says whether it is in your riding or ward, in a neighbouring one, or outside the map altogether. A seat elected by more than one ward counts every one of them, which is what a regional councillor needs. Matching costs nothing and calls no paid service: it is arithmetic on coordinates already on file.
The limits, from us, before you ask.
You are going to find these out eventually. Finding them out from a sales call after you have moved your list is worse for both of us.
Two areas drawn next to each other can leave a sliver of gap or a sliver of overlap unless you trace carefully. That is fine for the job it is for: turfs, walk lists and coverage. It is not fine for anything legal or compliance-facing, including the electoral district printed on a donation receipt, and pplCRM says so on the page where you draw.
We report two counts for every boundary set: households that landed in no area, and households that landed in more than one. They are counted when you open the map and again whenever you press Check again — a full count checks every located household against every area, so re-running it after each edit would make an editing session pay for that scan over and over, and a notice reminds you the numbers are out of date until you ask. You still find out about the gap you left, on demand, instead of a month later from a volunteer standing on a sidewalk.
They are not tax-deductible federally, so there is no tax receipt to issue and pplCRM issues none. Ask us for a US political contribution regime and the answer is that none exists. Your donors are still sent a plain donation receipt by email for every gift, which confirms the gift and makes no tax claim. Canadian political and charitable receipting is unchanged: numbered official receipts, gap-free, on the regimes that allow them.
pplCRM does not prepare or submit FEC or state campaign-finance reports, and does not claim to. Keeping the record and filing the report are two different jobs; we do the first one.
Tell us what you are running for.
Setting up a workspace takes a minute and the office question is part of it. Your free workspace opens with sample people, households and turfs already in it, matched to the country you pick. No card, no time limit.