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.
Just our voter history (whether a voter actually voted in a particular election) is, on average, 10 rows per voter record. 200 million voter records * 10 history records per voter = ~2 billion rows.
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.
Also, after signing up, people can correct/revise their voting records:
This is because 1) the states themselves don't keep complete records and 2) we don't have all voting history forever, as scarmig pointed out.
scarmig, you're "in the space" I googled and this was 1st: http://www.strike-the-root.com/3/scarmig/scarmig1.html What do you work on?
Sideline, is that related to Lessig's Root Strikers? Seems to be a different Libertarian site w/ unfortunate brand collision. :-/
As far as where in the "space" I am, it's a fairly well-established player, though I've been thinking of moving on recently. Just out of curiosity, how much a requirement is Python over there? Was thinking of dropping off a resume...
We're definitely not "full stack python" - best tool for the job, etc.
Example: http://www.smartvoter.org/2012/01/17/ca/la/
This shows 14 election days happening in 2011 for LA County. But many of those are limited to a particular city or congressional district. I think when the data gets recorded at the state level, some expediencies cause the "available election" count to be distorted.