(via Daily Kos)
GOP Voter Vault Shipped Overseas
When the Republican Party clinched close gubernatorial races in Mississippi and Kentucky in 2003, it relied heavily on its Voter Vault database to get people to the voting booths. Though party officials are tight-lipped about what’s inside the Vault, they’ve acknowledged it contains records on an estimated 168 million voters.
PC World has recently learned that the major development work on the Voter Vault was done in India. Though the RNC began work on a national database of voters in the mid-1990s, the Voter Vault wasn’t ready to be put into the field until the 2002 elections. Two years prior to the 2002 elections, the RNC hired Advanced Custom Software (ACS) of Seattle to build a Web-based database to help campaign workers target likely Republican voters. According to information posted on Elance.com, an online directory of outsourcing firms, ACS subcontracted development of the database to Compulink Systems of Maharashtra, India.
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The Republican party isn’t the only one using a massive voter database. Since 2002 the Democratic Party has relied on two databases–DataMart, containing the records of 166 million registered voters, and DemZilla, a smaller database used for fundraising and organizing volunteers.
DataMart, which would be considered the Democratic equivalent of the Voter Vault, is an open-source application created by PlusThree, a software developer with offices in Washington, D.C., and New York City. Vice President of marketing David Brunton says PlusThree did not outsource any of the development work on the DataMart.
The Republicans outsource their work to India, while the Democrats use an application from a U. S. company. Hmmmm….
