Inside Votizen - Tech, Design, Culture
paulstamatiou.com
Inside Votizen - Tech, Design, Culture
1–10 of 47 posts
Re: Inside Votizen - Tech, Design, Culture
#2Author here -- Please let me know what you think of this format. If it works, I'd love to do more of these immersive-get-to-know-a-startup articles with other startups. Is it too long? Does the Q&A structure work here?
My inspiration for this was The Setup (http://usesthis.com/), but in my own style -- focused on the startup and in my natural super-long-form.
Re: Inside Votizen - Tech, Design, Culture
#3> David: One state had its voter file arrive on a magnetic tape format called 128 CPI — characters per inch of magnetic tape (same format that was used by UNIVAC in 1951) — which is probably how Auric Goldfinger stored his data. Converting it to something useable was more expensive than acquiring the tape itself.
That's amazing. I wonder which state it was.
Re: Inside Votizen - Tech, Design, Culture
#4They claimed 2B rows for their voter database. If I understood that correctly, that means they know about 2 billion people.
Do they cover countries other than America? Because the population of America is only 300 million or so; even accounting for false positives (failing to sync two accounts as one person) or fake identities (pet dog has an account), I don't really see how you can get from 300m to 2b.
Re: Inside Votizen - Tech, Design, Culture
#5They claimed 2B rows for their voter database. If I understood that correctly, that means they know about 2 billion people. Do they cover countries other than America? Because the population of America is only 300 million or so; even accounting for false positives (failing to sync two accounts as one person) or fake identities (pet dog has an account), I don't really see how you can get from 300m to 2b.
It's about ~200M voters (United States only)
Re: Inside Votizen - Tech, Design, Culture
#6I really dig posts like this. As an engineer, this is the kind of stuff that makes a startup a really attractive place to work.
Re: Inside Votizen - Tech, Design, Culture
#7They claimed 2B rows for their voter database. If I understood that correctly, that means they know about 2 billion people. Do they cover countries other than America? Because the population of America is only 300 million or so; even accounting for false positives (failing to sync two accounts as one person) or fake identities (pet dog has an account), I don't really see how you can get from 300m to 2b.
It's about ~200M voters (United States only)
I'm guessing that their database isn't voter registrations but individual votes--one person can have multiple votes and registrations recorded over the years.
I still don't see how that could add up to a factor of 10, though. I'm in a similar space and typically people will have fewer than that, although the voter records we have don't go back more than a decade or so.
Re: Inside Votizen - Tech, Design, Culture
#8So question 1, what do they do exactly? I can't quite parse it out from the article. Can someone who doesn't use facebook frequently still use this?
Re: Inside Votizen - Tech, Design, Culture
#9Also how are they allowed to get voter registration data? Is that public information?
Re: Inside Votizen - Tech, Design, Culture
#10Also how are they allowed to get voter registration data? Is that public information?
Sort of. You have to pay a nominal fee for it and sign some documents indicating that you have a legitimate (political) use for them and won't use them for commercial marketing, etc.