The automated phone system Burns designed, called Victory VOIP, has allowed volunteers for Bush's would-be successor, Republican presidential nominee John McCain, to make thousands of calls to voters in the time it used to take to make hundreds. Burns' Cleveland-based company, Victory Solutions LLC, is now working for dozens of campaigns from federal to local in 16 states.

The system combines the automated efficiency of political robocalls, which sometimes garner a negative reaction from voters, with the personal touch of a volunteer.

Robocalls feature a recorded message, generally by a prominent figure, that is blasted out to thousands of targeted voters at a time. It's efficient but comes with political risks.

"When you're working on grass roots, there's always a frustration," said Burns, who served as the Bush-Cheney grass-roots coordinator in Cuyahoga County. "You look at it two ways: Either there are a limited number of volunteers, or there are significant volunteers and not the resources to put them to best use."

Burns felt political phone banks needed to be revolutionized. The standard practice is for a volunteer to show up at a calling center and receive a paper printout of phone numbers to call, a lead pencil and a ruler to keep their place on the page. Then, the dialing would begin.

The volunteer makes hours of grueling calls, then has to meticulously fill out paperwork recording each call for campaign managers.

With the VOIP system, the automation is virtually invisible to voters. A volunteer records a personalized message at the start of a shift that can be left each time a voter is called and isn't home. When the number rings to an answering machine, the system sends the message automatically even as it begins the next call — so no time is wasted, Burns said.

And even if the voter is home, the technology still saves time, said Lyn Bliss, who has had the system set up in her home for the past 12 weeks so volunteers can make calls for House Minority Leader John Boehner's re-election campaign. It stores numbers so volunteers don't have to dial them and sends an accounting of their work digitally to the campaign.

Bliss has never been keen on making political phone calls in the past, she said. It is tedious work. But the new technology, piloted in 2005, allows her to turn phonebanking into a kind of party.

The system can be set up anywhere there's an Internet connection and a power outlet.

"It was real easy to do," said Bliss, a Greenville Republican. "It was getting my house cleaned for everybody to show up that was the biggest effort."