Voter databases have become nearly as essential to national politics as money itself, and for the better part of the last decade the advantage has gone to the Republican Party and its Voter Vault database. This year the playing field has been leveled.

Bloomberg examines lobbyist Harold Ickes’ privately-owned Catalist and how it is being used by its biggest client, Democratic nominee Barack Obama, to narrowly target likely and undecided voters.

Both Catalist and Voter Vault contain information from voter rolls and tax filings, as well as consumer information that ranges from the media subscriptions to the shopping habits of over 200 million people. The U.S. Census Bureau’s American Community Survey (ACS) estimated in 2006 that there were nearly 226 million people over the age of 18 in the United States.

But some information — say, for example, the private emails of an Alaskan governor using Yahoo e-mail for government business — needs to be taken the old-fashioned way. It apparently took some devious hacker all of 45 minutes to guess Republican vice-presidential nominee Sarah Palin’s password. The woman who came up with unusual names like Track, Bristol, Willow and Piper apparently chose the word “popcorn” to guard her confidential communications.

Those hoping for incriminating documents and sordid affairs in the Palin e-mails will be disappointed, but those interested in a humorous account of hackers wrestling with the ethical dilemma of invading the privacy of someone who is trying to avoid public disclosure will enjoy this Arts Technica article.

On the legal side of snooping, Google Labs has launched a new audio search engine called Gaudi. The site currently only indexes political video from YouTube, but as Internet micro-celebrity Rex Sorgatz points out, that alone allows the average person to play Jon Stewart by producing so-called supercuts like the one below in which multiple clips on the same topic are sewn together to highlight hypocrisy or bamboozlement.