Democrats, GOP Go to New Lengths for Vote (predicting via stats)

[papau]

http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Voter-Files.html

October 20, 2003
Democrats, GOP Go to New Lengths for Vote
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS


Filed at 9:14 a.m. ET
WASHINGTON (AP) -- Voters' ballots are still secret, but technology is helping political parties get a pretty good idea who will vote, how they'll vote and the best way to make sure they vote -- long before people actually head to the polls.

The Democratic and Republican parties both are collecting information about millions of individual voters, a key ingredient in their 2004 campaign game. The close 2000 presidential election showed how important getting even a fraction more of a party's supporters to the polls can be.

The Democratic National Committee has ``DataMart,'' a new 158-million-record database of voter information connected to ``Demzilla,'' which tracks and manages party contact with donors and activists. The Republican National Committee has a 165-million-name database called ``Voter Vault.''``We can tell you exactly which house on which street we need to get out the vote, because we know that the issues they are concerned about are Democratic issues,'' party Chairman Terry McAuliffe said. ``And we know what to say, and we know what not to say.''The DNC has 306 pieces of information attached to every name, he said.

In addition to its value in get-out-the-vote efforts, the data the parties accumulate helps fund-raisers, who can use it to spot voters who identify with a party but haven't yet donated to it.
It also can help parties lavish special e-mails, direct mail and phone calls on small-dollar donors, who have become even more valuable now that the campaign finance law has banned corporate, union and unlimited individual donations.

The Democratic Party's database includes Census data, such as block-level demographic information; national consumer data, which provides individual details such as whether a person is married, owns a home and has children; voter files, which are available from several states and show a person's party identification and which elections he or she has voted in; and rundowns on how precincts voted in past elections.<snip>

[Philostopher]

1. Wonder if this is who called us the other night?

We have a public funding issue -- a human services levy -- on the ballot coming up. They called while we were sitting at the table after dinner, and my husband can't resist picking up the phone, even when he knows it's a cold sales call. This time, it was a survey -- but they were asking odd questions for a candidate survey. After he hung up, I asked him if he thought they were pro- or anti-levy and he said he didn't know. He said he thought it was a boiler-room call, though -- the person on the other end didn't pronounce the name of our city like people who live here do, he thought it was somebody calling from out of state. His answers -- and the questions they asked -- seemed (to me, as an observer) designed to try to convince him to vote against the levy, but he said he didn't get that impression from the actual call. I wonder if it was one party or the other calling on an issue that probably will split, at least moderately, along party lines? They did ask, at the end of the call, if my husband was registered to vote, and for which party. Funny to me that they didn't ask -- at lest judging from his answers -- if there were any other voters in the household, or what their registration status was. Maybe they already knew.

(edited for clarity)