My motive was "Where do i vote" is basically the top query on Google on election day, and people would get crappy answers. In fact, it was actually Ginny's idea (she's very civic minded), and she needed an engineer to help, and I was the only engineer in the DC office.

So i said "how hard it could it be" (famous last words) and did it. 2 swe's in geo got dragged in along the way because they thought it was cool (eventually we just staffed a team on our own).

Michael geary, who is on HN somewhere, did all the JS.

Along the way, i spent my time and energy creating the voting information project (with pew charitable trusts), and open standards for sharing the data necessary to answer this question, after discovering what a proprietary crap hole basic civic data like this is.

So there you go, now you know the motives.

In fact, if you ask some of the early data partners (until i could get critical mass in opening the data), you will discover we were in fact the only ones they pretty much ever had who asked to have all personally identifying info, etc. stripped from data sources before they were given to us.

They found it quite funny, because this kind of data is actually a big business owned by large political operative companies that have tentacles in various states. The notion that someone didn't want to know the people associated with the address records was hilarious to them.

These databases are large lists of who lives where, their political affiliation, voting history, and various political districts they belong to.

We want addresses and districts only.