Briefs

Feb 15, 2004 -- New York Times -- JON GERTNER

...These days, the first stop is a comprehensive database of U.S. voters. There are fewer than half a dozen of them. One, named Voter Vault, belongs to the Republican National Committee; another, named Datamart, belongs to the Democratic National Committee. ... Moreover, both parties have begun to sort through their troves of information in order to identify and then court individual voters.

...

Each party's databank has the name of every one of the 168 million or so registered voters in the country, cross-indexed with phone numbers, addresses, voting history, income range and so on -- up to as many as several hundred points of data on each voter. The information has been acquired from state voter-registration rolls, census reports, consumer data-mining companies and direct marketing vendors.

...

Quinn explained that data-mining technology offers three significant advantages. First, by locating likely voters with greater accuracy, it enables campaigns to spend their dollars more wisely and efficiently. Second, it opens up innovative ways of discovering and turning out new voters. Third, it creates the option of creating a narrow or individualized message.

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