I think Oliver Willis gets this exactly wrong:
The lists the party has - and especially the state parties - are legendarily woeful, and if it takes a group who's sole reason for being is a good, clean voter list - it helps all around. The goal here is electing people, not power plays.
Right, and the end result will be a power play, not a voter list. Harold Ickes, running a private, for-profit corporation controlling the database, will have full control over who can use it and when. And Ickes is not a party-builder: he's a Clintonista, with deep institutional ties to certain candidates and long-standing rivalries with other camps, particularly Howard Dean's coterie at the DNC. The reason you want the party to control the list is so everyone can use it. The reason Ickes is doing it privately is so that some can't. And while Willis claims to have inside information proving this all on the up-and-up, I'm going to have to see or hear some of it before I call the quacking, waddling waterfowl in front of me anything but a duck.
