About Votebuilder VA

What is Votebuilder?

VoteBuilder, one of the most valuable services offered by the Democratic Party of Virginia, is the online database which holds the voter file (all of the registered voters in Virginia). In other words, this database contains the names and other important information about registered voters – information that we can use to target likely voters for Democratic campaigns.

Using VoteBuilder is an essential part of any winning campaign. It is an important resource tool because of its ability to target and locate specific voters.

VoteBuilder users, campaigns and County Committees can find information about individual voters, identify groups of likely voters and turn those groups into walk or call lists, and enter the data from those completed lists. Through a separate section called “My Campaign,” VoteBuilder can be used to track and manage volunteers.

VoteBuilder is operated by the Democratic Party of Virginia in partnership with the Democratic National Committee (DNC). From President to Dog Catcher nearly every Democratic Campaign in Virginia for the past 10 years has helped to build one of the largest and most reliable voter file programs in the country. This unique and robust repository of historical voter ID in Virginia enables better targeting, higher certainty, and better decision making.

Party and Candidate IDs

Unlike many other States, voters in Virginia do not declare a party. The list of registered voters provided by the state tells us only that a voter voted – not for which candidate. For this reason, consistent candidate participation, data management and ID collection in Votebuilder over time has allowed us to provide every registered voter a Likely Party Score. This indicator is a “real-time” algorithm that calculates partisan leaning by analyzing the voter voting history as well as every response recorded by every campaign who has contacted that voter. To date over 20 million individual survey responses have been collected in the DPVA Votebuilder database. In addition to Likely Party, there are more than 50 targeting models and other demographic data to further increase a campaigns efficiency and save money.

Here are just a few of the campaigns who’ve participated in the State Party Program: