Some good news for #electionnerds. The Sloan Foundation provided us with support to collect a national snapshot of the voter registration databases with 2018 vote history. This is the first step to create an apolitical organization to collect and disseminate voter files
The political parties and their partisan vendors do a great job with creating national voter registration databases for their candidates and allied groups. There are some apolitical organizations that can't work with them, though.
Another limitation from an academic perspective is the parties and data vendors often employ proprietary algorithms and give limited (and costly) access to their data, if at all. An academic sandbox will facilitate more research in a more transparent environment
As an example, we've developed a method of audit the assignment of registered voters to districts. We've discovered thousands of assignment errors, which election officials have verified and fixed. This was possible because we have access to some states raw voter data
