 Early political campaigns on which Penn and Schoen worked include Hugh Carey's New York gubernatorial campaign in 1974 and Ed Koch's New York mayoral campaign in 1977, for which the company supervised the direct-mail campaign and polling.Initially, Penn and Schoen manually input data from surveys onto punch cards, which was labor-intensive and subject to errors.For Koch's campaign, Penn built and programmed a computer to process the survey results, allowing them to analyze polling data much more quickly.