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Difficulty accessing compiled historical early voting data

Analysts and researchers need county-by-county and state-by-state early voting numbers from past elections (2020-2024) in spreadsheet format, which are not readily available or compiled.

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FL score

62

out of 100

Verdict

VALIDATE

medium confidence

Competition

No competitor data yet

Trend

No signal yet

Compile and sell historical early voting data in spreadsheet format to political analysts and researchers.

The pain

Researchers spend 10-20 hours per election cycle manually scraping county election websites, calling offices, or piecing together fragmented data from multiple sources. Data exists but lives in PDFs, press releases, and local government databases with no standardized format.

The gap

Election data is public but not aggregated. No single source provides clean, comparable county-level early voting breakdowns across states and years. Researchers either build their own databases or pay consultants $5K-15K per project.

Build angle

Start by compiling 2020-2024 data for 10-15 swing states, validate willingness to pay with political campaigns, polling firms, and news organizations, then expand to all states. Charge $500-2K annually for access or $5K-10K per custom dataset.

Strengths

  • Clear, quantifiable pain point with existing willingness to pay (campaigns already hire data consultants)
  • Low technical barrier, data collection is manual but straightforward; spreadsheet delivery is simple
  • Recurring revenue potential if positioned as annual subscription with updated data
  • Defensible through relationships with county officials and data collection infrastructure

Risks

  • Market size unclear, may only support 50-200 paying customers, limiting revenue ceiling to $100K-400K annually
  • Data collection is labor-intensive and doesn't scale without hiring; margins compress quickly
  • Customers may build internal solutions once they see the data structure; low switching costs
  • Election cycles are predictable but infrequent; demand spikes 6 months before elections then drops
  • Public records requests and FOIA could commoditize the data; hard to maintain competitive advantage

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