Whats involved in building Aristotles voter files?
Aristotle puts a lot of time, money and energy into building the database on which VoterListsOnline.com depends. Different states take longer than others, for a multitude of reasons. Some state source files are collected from just one location, others require us to contact each county, or even each town in the New England states. Even in those states where the file is available from the Secretary of State (or similar office) and ready for use on a computer, Aristotle often collects more detailed vote history or political geography by contacting the counties independently and adding this information to the state voter file. Once the original data is collected from the authorities it is transformed into a national-wide standard format. The data is scrubbed extensively to do things like standardize addresses to USPS standards. The voters are organized into households so that voters can be identified by the variety of party registrations within their household, the the number of people in
Aristotle puts a lot of time, money and energy into building the database on which VoterListsOnline.com depends. Different states take longer than others, for a multitude of reasons. Some state source files are collected from just one location, others require us to contact each county, or even each town in the New England states. In some rural areas of the U.S., the source data is not available in electronic format yet. Even in those states where the file is available from the Secretary of State (or similar office) and ready for use on a computer, Aristotle often collects more detailed vote history or political geography by contacting the counties independently and adding this information to the state voter file. For even more details, contact Aristotle by e-mail at vlosupport@aristotle.com. Please indicate the specific state(s) in which you are interested.
