The Democratic National Committee has spent US$8 million since the 2004 presidential election to overhaul its core voter database as part of an effort to erase data-quality problems.

The Republican National Committee, acknowledged by both parties to have better exploited IT in recent elections, has expanded its use of a data mining and modeling technique called microtargeting, which adds consumer data to voter files to better identify potential voters.

Ben Self, the DNC's director of technology, said the Democratic Party's data quality problems in 2004 included a database with a list of Colorado voters that contained more names than the total population of the state. Also, some Florida voters were listed in the database as living in the city "Fort" and the state "Lauderdale," Self noted.

"We had some significant problems in 2004 that required us to start [rebuilding] technologically from ground zero," he said. "We have spent a significant portion of our time revamping the entire national database from the ground up."

As it began anew, the DNC was able to take advantage of emerging technologies, such as a data warehouse appliance from Netezza Corp. in Framingham, Mass., Self said. The committee replaced a MySQL open-source database with a dedicated device that includes high-performance hardware with database, storage and other software, he said.