Appropos of Dirty D's post, there were a few major developments on the DNC/organizing front today.  First of all, WaPo reports that Virginia Governor Tim Kaine will head the DNC; he will work part-time from Richmond until January of 2010, with day-to-day operations being overseen by Edwards and Obama staffer Jennifer O'Malley-Dillon.  Secondly, Marc Ambinder has a post that lays out an expanded role for the DNC in field organizing ("the fifty-state strategy on steroids") as well as some staffing changes for the future iterations of Obama for America.  Both are worth reading in their entireity.

Marc Ambinder has a good write-up of the final numbers on voter turnout for 2008.  Delays in counting and certification of all ballots meant that the total number could only be determined now.  What he found was very interesting.  Read more...

Marc Ambinder has a must-read post about the Democrats' use of voter data this cycle.  The whole thing is worth reading, so I won't excerpt here, but you should do yourself a favor and go read it--the glossary at the beginning is worth the click alone.

Before getting into the content of this morning's post, I'd like to say that it's kind of an honor to fill in for Texas Toast. I know him from college, and he's a fierce thinker.  I'm really thrilled that we were able to recruit him, and I'm sure that you guys will love his writing.

If you look to the right side of this page, you'll see that we link to exactly two Republican blogs: The Next Right and Patrick Ruffini.   I'll give you one guess as to what both of those sites have in common. Okay, it's Patrick Ruffini.  For those of who don't know him, Patrick is the guy who used to run the online division at the RNC and then left that to go run it for Giuliani. Since then, he's started his own consulting firm and has also launched The Next Right with a few collabortators.  The goal of the site is to try and use data in interesting ways to make positive and normative statements about the trajectory of the GOP coalition.  It usually makes for a great read, and I heartily recommend it to anyone.

This morning, however, I read a post from Patrick that was just dead wrong, and disappointingly so.

There's more.

In a rare occurence, Nate Silver writes something today that is, at a minimum, imprecise.  Explaining why he's optimistic about an Obama victory, he says that "McCain is pushing back against the fact that Obama is banking votes every day with a substantial national lead."  This is not the only time I've seen this argument, so I don't mean to pick on the 538 crew.  But in my view, this really oversimplifies the difference between early and regular voters. 

All kidding aside, this is a good review in the American Prospect and the book itself does seem interesting.  Definitely worth checking out.

Of course, once you have a file for a given state, the work is not over.  Even keeping the file at its current state, let alone improving it, will be an ongoing process.

First of all, from the day it goes up, the data gets staler and staler.  Ideally, every state in the union will be undergo the entire process frequently--especially for states with hot races in election years. 

Aside from regular rejuvenation, however, a file can be improved upon through contact with reality.  No matter how diligent the Secretary of State, certain problems on a file will slip through the cracks.  People will move, die, or get convicted; phone numbers will change, or go bad; party registrations will be altered.  All of these changes can be captured by a well-tuned field organization, and appended to the file, so that as election day gets closer the file can asymptotically approach perfection (this is a somewhat idealized picture; bear with me). 

When volunteers go out and canvass neighborhoods or phone bank, they can verify if an address is attached to the right name or whether or not a phone number is good; they can also gather information that is simply unavailable from other sources, like a person's top issue priorities.  All of this information is gathered, centralized, and scanned in, so that the state voter file is as up-to-the-minute as possible.  In the past, this was done by hand (when it was done at all); now, the use of new technologies like computers, palm pilots and bar coding of responses has greatly increased the efficiency of doorknocking and other field techniques.

Once you've gone through this process, you should have a list with millions of entries, each containing personal and consumer information--ideally for every registered voter, and all non-registered adults.  So what can you do with it? Plenty.

Once it's compiled, the data has to be accessed.  Various people can be granted different levels of access--making the whole file available to any volunteer would raise serious privacy concerns, not to mention possibly giving access to rival campaigns or, god forbid, the other party.  For low-level volunteers, this access can be extremely limited, while higher-level operatives can be granted more generous permissions.  Broader access can be granted through a web interface like the DNC's Votebuilder, RNC's Voter Vault, or Catalist's Q-tool.  Using some relatively simple Boolean logic, you can create lists of all the people in a state, district or precinct who share certain characteristics--for example, you might want to find all registered black voters under the age of 40.  With a certain (ever-diminishing) amount of inaccuracy, this is a trivial list to pull.

As you can imagine, this is extremely useful.  You can use these tools to do everything from create walk lists for your volunteers to pull samples for polls or blanket a state with direct mail.  Which is why these files are considered so valuable, and why making them is big business--with big consequences.