Voter Vault

The Republican strategy in the 2004 Presidential Election focused on using technological tools and traditional marketing plans to establish central command and control functions that directed the efforts of volunteers on the ground. It was a “centralized localization” strategy modeled after Amway and supported by vast amounts of data and new technologies.

The Amway strategy involved a cascading torrent of volunteers, from region, to state, to county, to precinct. The volunteers on the ground floor registered voters, talked with their neighbors, and gathered information. Ground level volunteers then transmitted all of this data upstream to campaign headquarters, where it was added to the Republican National Committee’s Voter Vault database.

Work on the Voter Vault database began in the mid-1990’s and it was not until 2002 that it became operational in the field. The RNC system remains years ahead of the DNC.

Although neither party organization is willing to reveal much about their databases (the DNC database system equivalent is called Demzilla/DataMart), published reports indicate that Voter Vault combines publicly available data, such as voter registration and political contributions, with consumer data and personal information gathered from phone calls and door-to-door canvassing. All data in Voter Vault is continuously updated, and because the database records information in a common format and utilizes a web interface, it is universally accessible online to all elements of the coordinated campaign effort.