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!

We'll assume that, for whatever reason, you want to create your own copy of a voter file, from the raw materials provided by the state.  In real life, of course, such a copy would be substandard in a number of ways, but it will be a helpful exercise that will show at least part of what goes into building a file.

I've decided to use Ohio as the site of our demonstration project.  First and foremost, Ohio is quite good at making its voter file available for download--anyone who wants to can grab the voter file for almost any political division from the secretary of state. 

To make our lives easier, let's say we're running for county commissioner in Adams County.  Our campaign is cash-poor, but our nephew just got a computer science degree from the local community college and hasn't found a job yet, so he's now our voter file manager (Adams County is not the big leagues).  Luckily, the county is so small that all our files will be relatively easy to work with.

The first step is to figure out what information is contained in the file.  Luckily, Ohio makes this easy for us as well--there's a header row at the top of the file (which, incidentally, contains only 17614 rows of data--few enough that any decent machine should be able to open it in a standard text-editor like Textpad).  I picked Ohio for a reason--not every state includes easy-to-understand documentation like that header row.

So take a look at that header row.  The first thing you'll notice is that this file is fairly detailed, with a unique voter ID, name, full addresses (registration address and mailing address), and vote history, along with a large number of districts.  Tomorrow, we'll go into actually loading the individual entries contained in that file.