Hugh Esco

Hugh Esco has built and administered multiple servers and develped tens of thousands of lines of working code deployed in production. While on staff with the Georgia Green Party, he developed with others PetVerify, a tool to help Party activists pre-verify ballot access petition signatures. He built a script which automated press release distribution by email, fax and web publishing. He's helped develop a series of tools which parsed the four million record Georgia voter database into 159 county files suitable for distribution to Party affiliates and candidates. In 2004 he led development of supporters.cgi, providing secure web forms which were that year used to raise nearly a third of a million dollars and identify hundreds of volunteers to support the Ohio Recount effort. He has developed complex data harvesting tools designed to help advocacy organizations track legislative activity.

Hugh approaches this work not only as a programmer with strong database skills. He understands the needs of electoral and advocacy campaigns. He has been a founding board member of multiple advocacy organizations. He worked the halls of the Georgia General Assembly on behalf of nearly a dozen organizations over a fifteen year period. He chaired from its founding until December 2005, the state-wide, multi-partisan Voter Choice Coalition which regularly forced floor votes in a hostile Assembly on issues of ballot access and auditable elections. He has served as staff to The Honorable Cynthia McKinney, of Georgia's Fourth Congressional District.

He was the founding Secretary of the Georgia Green Party, and served the organization as its Executive Director and Political Coordinator, recruiting candidates and supporting the campaigns of over thirty Georgia Green Party candidates across four General Elections and the intervening off-year municipal election seasons. He has collected thousands of ballot access petition signatures, and litigated the denial of ballot access in Georgia courts. He gave oral arguments before the Georgia Supreme Court in a case brought to compel a tabulation of the Nader-LaDuke vote in 1996. He has worked on campaigns for every office from city council and school board to President of the United States. He has filled roles as diverse as phone or door canvasser, volunteer coordinator, press secretary, treasurer, campaign manager, fundraiser and candidate.

He has also four times been a candidate for public office. He spent seven months in 1998, travelling 800 to 1400 miles a week in a campaign for Lieutenant Governor of Georgia which garnered write in votes from 43 counties. He staffed the Georgia campaign for Nader-LaDuke 2000 and went on to support Jeff Gates' Georgia campaign for US Senate in a special election pulling votes from 158 of Georgia's 159 counties while the Georgia Nader-LaDuke write-in effort garnered support from over 130 counties.

Yes, Hugh understands what the tools of the Interactive Web can do for electoral and political organizing. But more importantly, he's shaken enough hands while driving enough red clay back roads to understand what a candidate and a campaign needs from the Interactive Web.

He joins this partnership ready to bring this experience together to serve campaigns far beyond the Chattahoochee and Savannah Rivers which form Georgia's borders.