Both political parties treat their data operations as closely guarded secrets and will not even reveal exactly what kinds of information about voters are stored in their databases.
At times, politicians are assembling data that has no obvious application. With technology evolving, this information could be valuable in the future.
"A lot of it you just have to collect in good faith that later there will be some place it will apply," said Sarah Black, the Minnesota DFL voter file manager.
The Grandma Brigade's Pitzrick said she doesn't think the publicly available data that she and other volunteers are collecting raises privacy concerns.
"Is it any different than having Best Buy have it for you?" she asked. "It's out there."
Political parties can use the data they collect to look at how individual voters' opinions and loyalties change over time.
The Progress of the State quadriga at the base of the Minnesota State Capitol dome. Wikipedia image
In Virginia, a typical profile in the Democratic Party's database includes notes from the dozens of times campaigns have contacted a given voter since 2001, including which candidates the voter has supported over the years, and whether they were Democrats or Republicans, according to Brenner Tobe, the party's director of information and technology.
By the 2016 presidential race, Virginia Democrats will have recorded 15 years' worth of interactions with some voters.
Minnesota's data goes back even further, thanks to an early investment in a computerized data system in the 1980s.
"The pool of people we don't know something about gets smaller and smaller," Black, the voter file manager, said.
During this past election cycle, Democratic volunteers in Minnesota had one million new conversations with voters, which translated into at least one million new pieces of information about individual voters, Black said.
Democrats in Virginia and Minnesota collect a lot of data out of necessity, since voters in those states do not publicly register with a political party. There's no easy way to tell Democratic voters from Republican voters unless the party saves information about them.
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