As you may have seen, the Supreme Court ruled that the Ohio Secretary of State no longer has to match newly-registered voters against other government databases before allowing them to vote.  This is a major win for Democrats (who registered the vast bulk of new voters in Ohio this year, thanks to their record-breaking ground game) and for people who care about voting rights.  The first one should be obvious, but let me explain the second.

There's more...

This is the first installment of what promises to be an extremely interesting series by Jay at RealClearPolitics.   It takes a detailed geographic look at the opposing Democratic and Republican coalitions in Ohio, and gives a summary of who these people are and what they're voting for.  Later entries will address other swing states.  Definitely worth checking out if you're a political junkie.

So, we've decided to try and build a voter file for Adams County in Ohio.  We've downloaded the information we need from the secretary of state, and figured out what's in the file.  But all we have now is a massive text file.  What's the next step?

I think that the best way to illustrate this process might be to go through an example.  Over the next couple days, we're going to build a sample voter file, from the ground up.  I'll try to skimp on the technical details as much as I can get away with, but this will inevitably contain some actual programming.  So: let's begin!