Re: voter registration dbs

[Carl Malamud <xxxx@media.org>]

well, *certainly* worth doing to do the summary data.

and, if access to this data is a big barrier to entry in running a  
campaign, and the data is really public then it might be worth doing.

don't you have to go county by county or state by state to collect it?

On Aug 15, 2008, at 9:50 AM, Aaron Swartz wrote:

> > that's a tough one.  do you have a compelling reason to have it on- 
> > line that
> > helps you do your real mission or is this just "because it ought to  
> > be
> > public"?
>
> I wanted to show info like registered voters per district and turnout
> rates and stuff like that and this looks like the only free source.
>
> > my guess is politicos probably are going after that information, so  
> > it isn't
> > like if we don't do it it won't get done.  $0.02, but I don't know  
> > the
> > current state of the art on this particular issue, so it's just a  
> > guess.
>
> Yeah, but that stuff is all proprietary. Howard Dean and Hillary both
> have their own proprietary databases with all of it, costs a lot to
> access.