As the Seattle PI reports, Washington State is about to launch its new, federally-mandated, statewide voter registration file. This is good news for grassroots activist groups who might want to “enhance” their membership databases with information from voter registration files in order to do a better job of encouraging their members to get out and vote.

The creation of uniform statewide voter registration files is one of the few bits of good news to come out of the Help America Vote Act (HAVA), which otherwise seemed to be mainly about helping Republicans steal elections by funding inseucre electronic voting machines for many states. (But that’s another story, I suppose.)

I’m hopeful that these new voter files will make it far easier and cheaper for lots of different groups to use voter file information. For example, imagine being able to enter a person into your membership database, and immediately learn whether or not that person is a frequent voter — so you can figure out whether it is worth the time and effort to phonebank them at election time.

I’m also hopeful that this development will help break the strangehold that a few private data companies have managed to establish on statewide voter file information, which previously had to be patched together from a mishmash of often-low-quality county records.