Editor's note: Today's will be part 1 of a special two-day Building a Voter File extravaganza! Quite frankly, this topic is just too awesome to be tackled in one entry, so check back tomorrow for the thrilling conclusion.

Nate Silver had an interesting conjecture recently, in a post about how exactly Norm Coleman got his list of "improperly rejected ballots" in the never-ending Minnesota Senate race:

What I suspect Coleman did to come up with his list of 650 is something like this:

- Create a database of all ballots that were rejected for a non-matching signature ... maybe there were 1500 of these or something statewide.

- Run some algorithm to determine the likelihood of each of these 1500 ballots being a vote for Coleman as based on things like the precinct the ballot was cast in, any information Coleman has about the voter in his voter file, and perhaps even the voter's name (you can tell more than you'd think about someone based on their first and last name).

- All ballots determined by this algorithm to have a >50% likelihood of being Coleman votes were included on his list ... there turned out to be about 650 of these.

There's more beneath the fold:

I've been meaning to write about this since I heard the leak, but I wanted to wait till it was official. After all, seeing what Barack had to say, what the Committee members had to say, and most importantly, what Tim Kaine had to say, was going to give a lot of context to the replacement.  Blue Leader was right to expect that I'd have a lot to say, but even though I have an explosive temper and no fear of running my mouth, I do have a little bit of patience. Anyway, since the bourbon's out of the bottle, we may as well drink up.  With the appointment of Kaine to the DNC, I am still upset that Dean is without a job, if it's not to  be Dean at the DNC, I am cautiously optimistic that Kaine will do a good job.

There's more.

It's the most...wonderful...time...of the year.  That is, the time when the data for the 2008 elections finally comes in.  There's more...

In my last entry, I discussed matching lists when they did not share a common, persistent and unique identifier.  Basic conclusion: challenging! In this week's entry, I'll share a common technique for making the job a little easier--one which has a number of uses beyond list-matching.  Read more...

In my efforts to duplicate the straightforward plots of David Foster Wallace, I'm going to circle back yet again to one of my earlier posts.  There's more below the fold...

I'd like to follow up on Pluribus' brilliant post on downloading and using census data with an explanation of how these data can be useful to you from a polling perspective. You're starting to see some of this happen with voter file vendors, but, hey, remember, the point of this site is to help smaller groups who can't afford a Catalist subscription do all the crazy fun data things that we do. 

There's more.

Marc Ambinder has a good write-up of the final numbers on voter turnout for 2008.  Delays in counting and certification of all ballots meant that the total number could only be determined now.  What he found was very interesting.  Read more...

Just a quick note--some technical issues with what I had been planning to do with Building a Voter File left me without a piece this week.  I'll be back at my regularly scheduled time (having worked ahead).  In the meantime, please stick around; I've got a non-series post in the can.  My apologies.

As of the end of our last post, we've obtained and loaded into SQL a recent voter file from Adams County.  This week we're going to examine using the file in a very basic way.

In the last part of the Voter File tutorial, we loaded the Adams County, Ohio file into SQL.  It should now be ready to use.  But first, we need to go through some basic quality control on the file, which I'll show you how to do below the jump.