Monday, June 04, 2012

Don't Fear Online Voter Data

I haven't heard of any privacy advocates going bonkers about the Hamilton County Board of Elections decision to put voter information to go online, but just in case people start freaking out they must understand this is not information that wasn't already available online. If you were to go to the Ohio Secretary of State's website, you can download the entire voter database for Hamilton County in a matter of minutes.  Import that into MS Access and you can query anyone's voter registration and general voting history.

The description of the data available sounds like it is selective reports from the same database, just more up-to-date data. This provides a positive for independent candidates who can't afford the technical support major party hand picked candidates get.  More access to data for political candidates makes for a more open election process.

I really hope this does NOT create any significant protest. The tin foil hat crowd is always far more vocal than they make sense.

1 comment:

  1. Loading the csv file into your database ain't a walk in the park. It's 541,884 rows. Sorting is slow as molasses in Open Office. A bunch of the 57 columns are fairly useless to most of us, too.

    ReplyDelete

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