My buddy Connell runs an election/campaign advisory firm. He has a database that he uses to track voter profiles, create outreach lists, and the like. To minimize annoying voters — never a good idea when you’re running a campaign — he needs to stay on top of whoever has already voted, so he can take them off the outreach lists (who has voted is a matter of public record; how you vote is not).
Unfortunately, his database/computer guy isn’t available, and Connell wasn’t sure how to import the voting data. Worse yet, he couldn’t find the manual for the software. Between the two of us we came up with a number of different ways to try and work around these problems…but none of them succeeded. So, as always, when subtlety doesn’t work, it was time to turn to brute force :).