32 karma · joined November 11, 2014
Not the campaigns...the parties.
whoa man...those tech's aren't even in play. lol. It's MSSQL and Oracle, with .net web apps [usually] running on top.
building on hadoop/spark is way outside their wheelhouse.
I've chatted with a two different lawyers over here in Ohio...and both have advised strict security and election/campaign use only.
The problems listed below are pretty exact: huge data sets, lots of cleaning and normalizing, and the snail mail/cd problem is real. Additionally, I'd note that ~40% of the states [somehow] charge for the data...it takes six digits to get a snapshot of all 50 states - and certain states (looking at you FL) say that they do not store the historical, meaning you have to connect with the local BoE's to aggregate the data.
A part of me [now] wants to open source this because of the DNC's actions.
I am interested to see how "version 2" of this pans out.
For the record, workbench is not the end-all. It is quite clunky.