Let’s Make the Voter File Accessible

The voter file. Since 2004 this conglomeration of data has ruled campaigns and the lives of data directors everywhere. 

At CTA we’ve prided ourselves in making the voter file more accessible to movement groups across the country. We do this by 1) providing an easy-to-use and low-cost platform for data strategists to access this critical data. And, 2) by negotiating great rates with our data provider partners. 

In 2025, CTA rolled out a brand new offering. PAD (our analytics platform) + a voter file - for a fraction of what this combo would normally cost. 

What’s in a voter file?

“The” voter file contains a record for each registered voter in a state, including their name, voting address, and contact information, as well as their voting history, and sometimes additional information tracked by the state elections office like registered party. Data fields provided vary widely among states, so this data is then normalized by VF providers, who also add supplemental information about each voter and merge everything into “one” big national file. This supplemental information includes data from commercial sources, probabilistic models that predict support for an issue or candidate, likelihood to vote, etc.

Why is the voter file important? 

The voter file is critical to progressive orgs. Most obviously, it is used as the data source for voter contact. If your organization wants to contact voters, you need to know where they live, their phone number, etc. Additionally and equally importantly for political data folks, we use the voter file to perform analysis and create data-driven plans and strategies. If you want a specific candidate to win in a congressional district, it will help you a lot to know the demographic breakdown of the electorate in that district. If you want to build a predictive model to target voters who support your cause, you need data points from the voter file to train the model, and then you can assign scores to each individual in the file.

Sounds straightforward. Can’t I just obtain these files and UNION them together?

Each state (with one exception, bonus points if you know which one it is!) has a voter file - literally a file with a record for each registered voter. In some states, you can download this for free online. In others, you have to pay an exorbitant fee. In nearly all of them, frequent data changes and formatting issues make these files difficult to use on their own and almost impossible to consolidate into a national file.

Luckily, there are vendors in the progressive space who take on this complex acquisition and standardization work and then sell the voter file (nationally or state-by-state) to clients. At CTA, we have relationships with these vendors, and we take on the onerous engineering work of processing and importing these voter files directly into PAD. That way, you can focus your time on doing your actual job: pulling those voter contact lists, writing those path-to-victory memos, and building progress-to-goal dashboards!

Curious to learn more? CTA offers our partners many voter file options and does the work of ingesting, delivering, and maintaining voterfiles from all major vendors. Our CTA offerings also include a discount for our partners.