Thread by @mizzousundevil

It's a great day because today, 20 newsrooms all across Texas came together to purchase a prohibitively expensive public data set.

So what's the data set? We all pitched into buy the Texas Voter Registration Database, as well as voting history data from 2010, 2012, 2014 and 2016

My face when we actually pulled this off.

Thank you so much to all our partners for agreeing to do this huge thing. I'm hoping this becomes a framework for future collaboration.

We're pretty sure no one's done something like this before in Texas. We called ourselves the Texas Open Data Consortium for the case of this request.

So who's all in? I'm so glad you asked! @

@HoustonChron @dallasnews @ExpressNews @TexasTribune @HoustonPubMedia @electionland @KFOX14 @kdbcTV @WFAA @TexasMonthly @KXLN45Houston @keyetv @KHOU @BigLocalNews @elpasotimes @KVUE @callerdotcom @KRIS6News @abc7breaking @abc13houston @KPRC2

That's 20 newsrooms but 21 twitter handles. One of the TV stations has two stations in one newsroom :)

So why do this? Why get this data?
We can tell stories about:
The upcoming midterm elections.
The demographics of newly registered voters.
How many people were removed from the rolls? What did they have in common?
Where new registrants are from (county, ZIP code)
And much more!

Each newsroom had to provide a signed affidavit saying we would not use this data for commercial purposes.
We will only use this data for news gathering and stories.
We've all agreed to NOT post the entire data online.

This is a fantastic thing for open data, for journalism in Texas, for better and more in-depth stories on our electorate across the state. So let's go forth and do some great journalism everyone!