Since the start of 2023, Data Trust has been working on the major project of unifying our voter file format to ensure that there is no difference in the way users interact with our data, regardless of where they receive it from. While many of these formatting changes were already needed, this has become an especially critical update following our significant investment in a new best-in-class phone source.
With these overhauls now pushed live for all our clients, users will find significantly more data elements directly available for targeting, without needing to leverage secondary data sources not on our core voter file. This further emphasizes our renewed focus on providing quality, accurate data – without raising any prices on our core voter file product.
Added Fields
- Phones: With the addition of Neustar, we needed to carry many more phone fields on our voter file to fully provide all available phone data to our clients.
- Phone: Our traditional phone field remains on the file for those who simply want the best phone number available. This will prioritize Data Axle phones, then backfill with raw source phones.
- Voter Data: Raw voter file and AB/EV file phone numbers will now be listed independently.
- Data Axle: Our traditional source of phones will now also live in a standalone column.
- Neustar: Our new additional source of phones will come with the following information:
- Match Level – A standard matching code.
- ReliabilityCode – A two-tier model – high and medium – used to determine how confident the provider is in the match.
- Call Window – A new phone data element, which indicates in GMT the time of day that the phone is most active.
- Source Fields: To provide better clarity on where certain elements come from, the following elements will now have a source field: Sex, Date of Birth, Registration Date, Change of Address, and the core Phone fields.
- School Board & District: These will now be present where available.
- Voter Regularity: To better track historical voter turnout, this new field indicates how often individuals voted based solely on the elections where they were eligible to participate, rather than including elections where they were not yet registered.
- New Cycle Vote History Fields: VH23P, VH23G, VH24PP, VH24P, VH24G
Content Updates
- MetroType: Data Trust has traditionally pulled this from a consumer data provider, which simply classified counties as urban or rural. In need of a significant update, we are now using definitions from the Department of Education to classify geographies as City, Suburban, Town, and Rural. We will have a more detailed explainer on this methodology available soon.
- CensusBlock: Similarly, this too was pulled from our consumer provider. We now run every address through Geocod.io for significantly more accurate values for this field, similar to how we updated our longitude & latitude in 2022.
- PG Fields: To describe the contents of these fields more clearly, they have been reimagined and renamed, separated as Coalition IDs and Modeled fields.
Dropped Fields
These are fields that are no longer supported from their source list, or we have found are minimally used. These fields include:
- CD/SD/LD_NextElection: Users will now find the 2011 district lines in the _PreviousElection fields, while the current (2021) district lines can be found in the proper CD/SD/LD fields.
- StateCalcParty, PartyFramework, Ethnicity_Observed, MetroType_Per: These fields no longer have supported underlying data sources.
Name Changes
There are numerous small changes to unify differences between our many different client voter files. Some of these are clerical, such as “Precinct” to “PrecinctCode,” which differentiates between its sister field “PrecinctName.” Others are to unify terminology, such as renaming “OfficialParty” as “RegisteredParty.”
We are excited to continue to talk about some of these new data elements in the coming months, from the quality of the Neustar phones to the expansive update to our MetroType field. Stay tuned here for frequent updates all summer.
