Democrats used good data to win midterms
Party scrapped worn-out computers and old voter
files for newer technology
BY Dibya Sarkar
Published on Feb.
12, 2007
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| The Democratic Party’s victories in the
midterm elections that enabled it to take control of the
House and Senate were partly because of a new Democratic
National Committee information technology system that
improved its get-out-the-vote initiative, officials
say.
Designed by Boston-based Intelligent
Integration Systems (IISi), the system was used last
spring to sort through the 200 million voter records and
more than 900 fields associated with each record to
target prospective Democratic voters.
The core
component of the system is a data warehouse — developed
by Netezza, a company based in Framingham, Mass. — that
helped users sift through data faster and more
accurately, DNC and IISi representatives said. The new
system includes data quality software from FirstLogic,
which Business Objects acquired last spring. In
addition, it features extract, transform and load
applications from Sunopsis and SPSS’ modeling software,
representatives said. Officials estimate the system’s
cost to be less than $1 million.
Jim Baum,
Netezza’s president and chief operating officer,
described the company’s flagship Performance Server data
warehouse product as an appliance because it bundles the
database software with server and storage capabilities
in a prepackaged device that is quick to install and
inexpensive to maintain.
Although Netezza’s
bundled capability was a factor, Richard Zimmerman,
IISi’s president and chief technology officer and the
system’s chief architect, said the appliance’s
performance was the primary consideration. He said it
ranked higher than other vendor products they
reviewed.
“The Netezza system runs literally two
orders of magnitude faster than a comparable traditional
architecture system, like an Oracle system, and it’s
cheaper than that,” he said.
The DNC’s former
system could hardly be described as a system, Zimmerman
said. It was a bunch of computers housing numerous voter
lists — provided by state parties, secretaries of state
and other sources — that workers tried to reconcile.
That was no easy task, he said.
“Every time the
state parties would give them another list, it would
have different sets of fields,” Zimmerman said. “And one
time, they’d get them and they would have a bunch of
phone numbers. The next time, half the phone numbers
would be gone, and the third time, the first name and
last name were in one field [but] the next time, they
were split out in two different fields.”
The
result was low quality and inconsistent data, he added.
Gus Bickford, a database consultant and former
executive director at the Massachusetts Democratic Party
for five years, said a crucial factor in the success of
the party in November was cleansing the data to match
potential voters’ names with the right contact and
demographic information.
Such data is created at
the county or precinct level and usually is typed in by
clerks or others, who send it to the DNC. A great deal
of work then goes into standardizing the data so that
names, addresses and other pieces of information are
consistent. Data cleanup usually occurs twice before the
fall elections, Bickford said, and people check the data
against several sources, including consumer information
and the national change of address file. Then they send
the data back to the state parties. He said the new
system allowed the DNC to get quality voter data out the
door two to three times faster.
“And then you
[clean] it a third time in either late September or
early October because you want to get all the newly
registered voters,” Bickford said. “And so that’s why
the turnaround time is so critical” for processing the
data.
Microtargeting is new election
tactic
Microtargeting is an election
practice that uses computer modeling to track, aggregate
and target voters based on considerable amounts of
information, such as consumer habits and other varied
data. Republicans were the pioneers in political
microtargeting, but Democrats are just beginning, said
Paul Davis, chief executive officer of Intelligent
Integration Systems, which built a new voter database
system for the Democratic National Committee.
He
said microtargeting wasn’t available to the DNC in last
November’s midterm elections, but it could leapfrog what
Republicans have once the new system is complete.
Decades ago, he said, people who organized local
political campaigns and precincts knew a lot about their
neighbors, but as people became more mobile and
transient, such grass-roots intelligence
declined.
“The irony is technology is in some
ways allowing us to go back to that individual
communication again,” Davis said. “So the tools are
helping us to adapt for changes in society in allowing
that sort of grassroots connection.”
— Dibya
Sarkar
|
