For immediate release
Contact: Mark Grebner, 517-351-5105

• Our statewide voter file includes 3.9 million individual records of voting age adults, whether they vote or not ("potential voters"). About 25% have not voted.


• Our file has voter history information going back 8-12 years for each individual. It includes 15,000,000 ballots cast, providing a nearly complete voter history since 1996.


• Our voter file has 40 fields of information for each individual, including: name, address, date of birth, phone number, voting history, legislative districts, wards, felony status, partisan preference, etc. We buy a new copy of almost every phone book in the state every time they are published and match phone numbers to our master voter file.


• 53% of the state's voting age population is kept track of by local officials with some manner of computerized database or spreadsheet. 47% is only kept on paper, and often handwritten.


• Only about 250 municipal electronic voter files (out of 330 or so total) have significant, usable data. Others are not kept current or have so little recorded information they are not useful (we get paper files for these communities). Our company has conducted five rounds of purchasing and converting all the state's electronic files, at a cost of approximately $50,000 per cycle. It appears the State Election Board contemplates spending at least 20 times that amount for the same work, even though they won't have to pay local charges.


• To collect and key-enter the 47% of the voting age population which exists only on paper files now occupies slightly less than two full-time employee equivalents, even for a Presidential election. This includes adding new voters, updating voter history, and recording changes of address. Depending on the number of ballots cast, our company spends between $50,000 and $200,000 per election to obtain, key-enter, and post voter data.


• About 50,000 people move or change addresses every month (600,000 a year). We match our file to the national change of address file once or twice a year.


• Approximately 75,000 kids turn 18 each year.


• 3000 voting age adults die every month, on average, and are removed from our file.


• The Department of Corrections sold us a list of 73,000 individuals with felony convictions. We matched 28,000 against our master file. Only a handful of these people voted. We presume the rest of the people are still in prison, have moved out of state, are dead or the name DOC gave us was an alias.


• 70-75% of all voter registrations occur at the polls on Election Day, thereby making a list of only registered voters (instead of potential voters) inadequate on Election Day.


• For 70% of all voters, the first election in which they cast a ballot is a Presidential general election. Spring non-partisan elections include almost no new voters, or even people who have recently moved. Roughly 5% to 15% of new voters cast their first ballots in September partisan primaries, or non-Presidential (gubernatorial) even-year elections.


• We are presently collecting electronic voter files from municipalities that keep reliable data electronically, and many of them are still not done entering new voter registration information and voter history information from the Nov. 2004 general election.


• Voter ID Idea: WisDOT has, or will soon obtain, a photo of almost every voting age Wisconsin adult. Thumbnail versions of these photos could be included in a statewide voter registration database and printed out for use by poll workers on Election Day. Instead of having to bring photo ID to the polls, voters would just need to bring their face because their photo would already be available if a question arose. If these thumbnail photos were printed black-and-white, 60 to a page, each ward would only have 20-40 pages, which is easy to handle. This would make it hard for somebody to vote fraudulently, because there is a real danger of being caught, and it would be easier than requiring voters to bring photo-ID's to the polls.


• It cost us $500,000 to create and build our statewide voter database from scratch. $400,000 more to maintain and update it for 5 years. Virchow Krause was paid $200,000 to do a study about creating a statewide voter database, and an additional $800,000 to draft the RFP to hire someone to create the database.