With all of the talk about voter databases and their value, I decided to read up a bit on the Republican and Democratic databases. I thought I'd share what I've found out. (I should note that several of the articles I found were from 2004, so it is possible that some of the findings below have changed.)
The Republican voter database, Voter Vault, has been around longer and is significantly larger than the Democratic databases, which are known as DataMart and Demzilla. The Democrats enlisted an organization called Plus Three to build a database with the hopes that it could compete with Voter Vault. Demzilla is primarily a donor and activist list, while DataMart includes a larger range of variables. Both Voter Vault and Demzilla include data on more than 160 million Americans, probably including you. (It has been reported that Voter Vault was developed in India.) Each database includes several hundred variables.
According to NewsMax,
The highly sophisticated Republican data bank, "Voter Vault," not only is tailored to each county - so that it can be used to get out the vote and target likely Republican voters within Democratic precincts - it can be downloaded into a PDA, allowing precinct workers to add information picked up in door-to-door visits.
The Republicans themselves are stunned by the inadequacy of our database.
"We had surmised that the DNC database was not useable by state and local parties," said Collister "Coddy" Johnson, who was national field director of the 2004 Bush-Cheney campaign. "But to see it written in plain ink was unreal. Think about the loss of economies of scale and efficiency that this causes, not to mention the inability to have a coherent national field strategy. It was amazing."
The Republicans assign numbers to voters according to their political affiliation.
"We have a numeric coding system," said Washington state Republican Chairman Chris Vance in an interview about the Vault. "One is a hard Republican. Two is a soft Republican. Three is an independent. Four is a soft Democrat. Five is a hard Democrat. Six is someone we reached, but refused to answer our questions. A zero is someone we have never been able to reach, we know nothing about."
The Republican database is available to campaigns in all 50 states, but in 2004, the Democratic database was available to state parties in only 36.
John Kerry's campaign used the Democratic database to target 100,000 veterans and their spouses in Iowa, which is believed to have contributed significantly to the Iowa caucus results in his favor, according to the communications director for the Iowa Democratic Party.
According to the LA Times (June 26), Voter Vault "was used to precision in the San Diego County special election."
The program allows ground-level party activists to track voters by personal hobbies, professional interests, geography -- even by their favorite brands of toothpaste and soda and which gym they belong to.
Both parties can identify voters by precinct, address, party affiliation and, often, their views on hot-button issues. Democrats also use marketing data, but Voter Vault includes far more information culled from marketing sources -- including retailers, magazine subscription services, even auto dealers -- giving Republicans a high-tech edge in the kind of grass-roots politics that has long been the touchstone of Democratic activists.
As a result, Republicans have moved well ahead of Democrats nationally in their ability to find previously unaffiliated voters or even wavering Democrats and to target them with specially tailored messages. Voter Vault, although it is a closely guarded GOP trade secret, is nevertheless easily accessible to on-the-ground campaign workers and operatives should they need to mobilize votes in a hurry.
A few additional examples of uses of voter databases:
* In 2004, Voter Vault was used to compile a list of Russian-speaking Jewish immigrants who supported Bush's terrorism stance, and then to organize a rally in Russian on the Sunday before the election.
* In Arizona in 2002, Democrats used databases to find three groups leaning toward the Democrat, Janet Napolitano, and targeted messages about fiscal responsibility, leadership, and personal values to those three groups. Napolitano won the election.
I've been an analyst of large data sets for several years. I can understand those who have privacy concerns about this type of "data mining." However, I also understand the value of data analysis to identify issues, trends, and concerns. In the summer and fall of 2004, I walked house to house in an adjacent precinct, updating the Democratic voter lists for our county, registering voters, and attempting to bring some Democratic voters into the fold. That precinct is a highly mobile one, and I was pretty surprised at what a high percentage of the listed voters no longer lived at that address. Such outdated lists make house to house or telephone GOTV efforts very, very difficult. I crossed out dozens of names on the paper list and updated them with the new residents' names, and fed those lists back to the party. I hope those updates made it into the national list.
I'm glad Howard Dean and others are making data gathering a priority, because I feel it's an important tool for us as we move toward a broader strategy of attracting voters from a diverse range of geographies, concerns, and issues. Several articles list concerns about the flexibility and cumbersome nature of the Democratic database, as well as the quality of the data itself. I have my own concerns about accuracy given what I found going house to house in 2004. I hope they will move to address those problems.