Hello,

I’m looking for some story ideas that use voter registration data.

I recently attempted to find dead registered voters, after I obtained my state’s entire voter registration database. It lists names of voters, address, county they live in, DOB, the last time they voted, and much more information. To make a long story short, we only found one dead person on the database’s active registered voter roll.  As far as we can tell, the state’s election commission is doing a pretty good job.

While we got the database for free, I know campaigns spend up to $3,000 for the same information to target voters who voted in the last primaries.

Anyone got any story ideas using voter registration data. I have this great database, but I don’t know what to do with it.

Thanks,

Andy Pierrotti

WSPA-TV, CBS 7

apierrotti@wspa.com

It’s an old chestnut, but if your database, like the one here, contains a record of whether each voter actually voted in past elections, you can look up folks running for public office and see if they bothered to vote in the past. You almost surely will find some who didn’t.

Steve Orr

Democrat and Chronicle

Rochester, NY

You can map districts – be they congressional or local – to show enrollment, or past turnout, then run that past local political experts to give audiences an idea of what’s going to happen in a particular race.

You can cut for all kinds of demographics – age, gender, etc.

You can put a database on your site so that viewers can look up which district they live in – useful with county legislature issues, congress, etc.

Also, make the database accessible across your newsroom intranet and you have the greatest local phonebook/cris-cross directory imaginable:

·         Cops and others who’d never list their home phone numbers anywhere else list them here. And if they don’t, their spouses and/or kids do.

·         It’s a great way to find neighbors when you have breaking news on deadline. We were able to locate eyewitnesses to a small plane crash last year using voter reg.

It’s also great for finding good “real people” sources for election stories – instead of going to the mall and asking “do you plan to vote this year,” you can pre-identify people in different parties, towns, etc. who vote EVERY election.

--DS

Hello,