Washington Post: “…The Post’s voter file is compiled by L2, a data firm founded by its two eponymous L’s, Lourene and Lindy Criddle, in the mid-1970s. Within L2, dozens of engineers hammer away on secure servers to update, clean and standardize public voter records bought from the states. Such voter rolls, constructed under the auspices of the 1993 Motor Voter Act and the 2002 Help America Vote Act, aim to increase voter participation and prevent voter fraud. These files, buttressed by data from other sources, have proved phenomenally popular among political campaigns from school boards on up, explaining how all those canvassers and flier-mailers get your address. The Post licenses them for election modeling and polling…We can (and probably will) wring dozens of columns from this one monumental file. But we’ll start by asking the simplest question: Which names are most popular within each of the major parties? After all, the file is perhaps the greatest compendium of American names not locked away in some government vault, and while voter registrations don’t say who you voted for, they often say which party you registered with. We started by testing the quality of the data. While we knew it was super wonky (in the good sense of the word), it also looked super wonky (in the bad sense of the word). Our initial tests showed that the most popular Republican-only names in the United States are Andy Byler, Steven Stoltzfus, Elmer Stoltzfus, Jacob Stoltzfus and Benuel Stoltzfus — each of which describes at least 37 registered Republicans and not a single Democrat. Can you guess what’s going on? Then you’re way ahead of us! Hilariously, in hindsight, Google didn’t show a huge online presence for any of them. But upon deeper inspection, we traced every Benuel and Elmer back to their own legitimate registration. So, we peered again at their addresses and soon everything made sense: Almost three-quarters were in Pennsylvania, and almost half of all of America’s Stoltzfuses live in just one county — Lancaster…”