I hate to say that Paul is right, but Paul is right … data exchange standards are a good idea, within and across states.  Thad and I made the case in our July 2005 report, The Next Big Election Challenge: Developing Electronic Data Exchange Standards for Election Administration.

While we have yet to have a direct discussion at the NAS VR workshop about data exchange standards, the issue lurks in the background in all of these discussions.

This afternoon we had a wide-ranging discussion of interstate data sharing and matching. The consensus seems to be that interstate data sharing is helpful as it produces cleaner voter registration lists, and that interstate data sharing is just one of the tools in the kit for election administrators to use to produce cleaner lists. We also had an interesting discussion of whether the current regional data sharing practices should be broadened, and if so, how might that happen.