Obtaining Voter Registration Data
By Dave Wallace - RIVER BENDER - November, 2011
The Craven County Board of Elections is responsible for registering voters for federal, state and local elections in Craven County. They manage elections, provide results and gather statistics. Their webpage is at http://www.cravencounty.com/departments/elc.cfm. This is an interesting site with lots of good information. Take a look at it. I'm writing about it because I used the Board of Elections recently to obtain a free database of registered voters in Craven County. You might wish to do the same but I must warn you that the file is over 16 megabytes in size.
Why obtain a database of registered voters? For one, you can determine the political party your friends are registered with, be it Democratic, Republican, Libertarian or Unaffiliated. But better yet, it provides a source to check a person's address, phone number and age (date of birth is no longer a public record). Since I manage e-mail lists I use the database often to check members' addresses, phone numbers and age.
Unfortunately, you can't obtain voter registration data directly online. Instead you must use the Election Board's website to print out a "Voter Registration Data Request Form" which you fill out and hand carry to the Board's office in the County Administration Building at 406 Craven Street. There is no cost so long as you request to receive the data via Internet email. On the form check the data fields you want and in a couple days or less you'll receive the database attached to email. It will be a .CVS type file which can be displayed provided you have spreadsheet software like MS Excel. I suggest you limit the fields you select because the basic ones alone will cause the file to be over 16 megabytes. Unless you have broadband Internet high speed access, I don't recommend anyone getting the database unless they're willing to spend a lot time downloading it.
A nice thing about spreadsheets is that you can arrange columns and rows as you wish and sort data. For example, I was curious how River Benders were registered. Does the town have more Democrats or Republicans? To do this I extracted River Benders from the database by keying on Precinct 5 and pasting the entries into a new spreadsheet. From there on, I sorted voters into separate columns for Republicans, Unaffiliated, Democrats, and Libertarians. You can see results at http://pages.suddenlink.net/davew/RBVoters2011.xls. As of 9/11/2011 we had 2369 registered voters in River Bend with Republicans (38.9%), Unaffiliated (32.8%), Democrats (28.1%) and Libertarians (0.2%).