I recently had a reason to look up the (political) party affiliation of some people. The Broward County Supervisor of Elections Office has a website where you can look up this information, but to protect the privacy of the Broward County citizens it requires the person's birth date as well as their name. Obviously, if you know the people you are searching for, this isn't a problem. However, you might want to know the political affiliation of people you don't know, too; e.g., sending out a political flyer to members of your political party. So the question becomes, how do you find out people's birthday's?
One source of birthdays is the Clerk of Courts website; in Broward County, anyway. If somebody has received a traffic violation, murdered somebody, or has been charged in any way with an infraction of the law, their birth date is published on that website. So using techniques similar to those described in my blog Creating Leads From The Internet I was able to get the birth dates of 8 people. Why only 8 people? The Whitepages API only lets you make 200 queries/day, and only 44 of the phone numbers I generated were legitimate phone numbers. Of those 44 phone numbers, only 8 people had a criminal history. Of those 8 people, only 4 were registered with a political party; 2 Democrats and 2 Republicans. Note: The above statistics were gathered on 02/15/2012
I just put the program that searches for these criminal voters (one guy was jailed for for drinking beer on the beach, about 30 years ago - his case is still pending) on my ftp site (04/15/2012). I've also included (this is a must include - the program won't run without it) the web page that the program uses as a template for calling up voters on the web. Here are the links:
http://community-info.org/WPAPISearchVoters.java http://community-info.org/CheckVoterStatus.htm
Right click on the links above and then click on "Save target as" to get the
files and put them in a folder on your system. This folder is going to fill up
with files as you use the program, so it needs a folder reserved for this purpose.
You will have to edit one line of code in WPAPISearchVoters.java There is a
line, String urlStrEnd = ";api_key=akeyyougetfromthe
whitepagesapiwebsite"; that you need to change for this program to run.
Goto
http://developer.whitepages.com/ and get a key
for the Whitepages API. Then replace "akeyyougetfromthe whitepagesapiwebsite"
with this value.
Then compile the Java program as usual for
a Java program:
javac WPAPISearchVoters.java
//Of course, you need the Java JDK installed on your system
Next run the program: java WPAPISearchVoters 954 999 9999
//where 954 999 9999 is a valid telephone number in Broward County
I wrote this program to use the Broward County Clerk of Courts website to get
the birth date of criminal voters
If you want to use this program in another county (e.g., San Bernandino, i.e., a
county anywhere in the country) you'll need to modify the class DOBParser.
DOBParser is in the file WPAPISearchVoters.java, and is called to create a
parser that parses out a birth date. Of course you'll have to change the URL of
the website that is called for this info; it's in the main loop of
WPAPISearchVoters.java
When you run the program it looks up the phone number you entered on the command line (and adds 1 to it for each iteration of the main loop, until we are out of queries for the day - the Whitepages API limits you to 200/day) with the Whitepages API. WPAPISearchVoters then parses out the name of the person who owns this phone number (parses out of the XML file that the Whitepages API creates). WPAPISearchVoters takes the voter name and looks the person up in the Broward Country Clerk of Courts website; we get a birthday if the person has a criminal record. Finally, the program replaces the firstname, lastname and birthdate in an html template I created, and then pauses.
Bring up Windows Explorer (Nautilus if you're running Fedora, ROX-Filer if you're running Puppy Linux, etc.) and goto the folder that contains WPAPISearchVoters.class Double click on the newly created html file; e.g., JaneDoe.html Click on the "Submit" button. A page pops up that asks you enter captcha characters; enter the characters and then click on the "Submit" button. If this person is registered to vote a page will pop-up with their voter info; e.g., their party affiliation. Then go back to the MS/DOS window where WPAPISearchVoters is running and hit enter too get the next voter.
Obviously, if the person isn't registered to vote, you don't get voter info. If the person doesn't have a criminal record then we don't get a birth date, and the program doesn't create an html file for the person. If you see the person's name come up on the MS/DOS window and the program pauses, don't get shook up if you can't find an html file for the person; it means there was insufficient information to create the html file, so just hit enter and wait for the next name to come up.
This program is a time saver. WPAPISearchVoters will save you about 3 to 5 hours per run over entering this info all by hand into multiple websites. However, it can be optimized (sped up) and save you even more time. E.g., When it's time to create the html page for the voter search site, I read in the template file, CheckVoterStatus.htm to create a string that can be modified (strictly speaking, strings in Java aren't modified - a new string is created). It would be faster to read in the template file once, and save the string so it can be used over and over for each iteration of the main loop. Say you get 21 birthdates in a run (that's what I got tonight); that means a 20 second savings for the entire run if it takes 1 second to open a file, read it and create a string (OK, so it might be more like a 2 second savings - but I haven't done any optimization, so there are bound to be other time savings as well).
I just ran this program again, on 09/03/2012. The last time I ran it was 04/20/2012; just got tired of it. I found 5 Democrat, 2 Republican and 2 independent criminals. As always, I made 200 phone number queries, but only got 62 published phone numbers. Out of 62 published numbers I found 28 people with a criminal record, and 9 of them are registered to vote.
| # of Inquiries | 3400 |
| # of Phone #s Found | 737 |
| # of Birthdates Found | 245 |
| # of People Registered with a Party | 63 |
| # of Democrats | 39 |
| # of Republicans | 14 |
| # of Independents | 10 |