The six-person company provides Web-based, paper or Palm Pilot technology for use by door-to-door canvassers. With its main offices in Cambridge, Mass., the company also has a smaller local office on Providence’s East Side, housing just Adler and the server where the very sensitive data is stored.

Adler is confident in saying that the business offers the best Web-based voter files out there and that it has the largest market share within the emerging industry.

Adler and partner Mark Sullivan met just a few years ago as consultants working for the Massachusetts AFL-CIO. Sullivan had been hired to write a program for the group, while Adler was handling the network itself. With more than a day of troubleshooting needed to get the system working smoothly, Adler mentioned his experience in Web database development. A few weeks later, Sullivan, who had some political experience, called with a business proposition.

Voter Activation Network was born out of that chance meeting.

The company now has a presence in 22 states, having added Connecticut just two weeks ago, and except for Pennsylvania, is being used by groups in all of the toss-up “battleground states” where political pundits know this year’s presidential election will be decided.

Voter Activation’s first client was the Iowa Democratic Party, which signed on in late 2001. Eventually, each of the serious contenders for the Democratic presidential nomination would sign on for the service.

“We knew we had a flexible, fast system that allowed for ease of use,” Adler said. “But getting into Iowa and setting up that first network, we finally got an idea of how incompetent the competition was.”

The Providence file server is where all the information intersects, although what exactly certain groups can access is highly guarded. After the primary, the Iowa Democratic Party allowed all the campaigns access into their customized Voter Activation Network, which included a list of all 1.8 million registered voters in the state and the more than 100,000 Iowans known to have attended a Democratic caucus between 1980 and 2000.

If the company were approached by a Republican-leaning group, Adler said his company would politely decline the work.

“At the end of the day, you really do need to take a side in all of this,” Adler said.

Today, one of the company’s largest clients is America Coming Together, a Democratic voter mobilization group working in 17 states to target undecided voters with thousands of paid and volunteer canvassers. Voter Activation allows those canvassers to input detailed information about voters into a database that can be searched in an astounding amount of detail.

Beyond looking to call up voters in a certain precinct, lists can be broken down by a mix-and-match set of demographics ranging from whether a voter is likely married or single, to whether a voter is likely a dog or cat owner. Lists culled from places such as the ranks of the AFL-CIO, or Sierra Club memberships, can also be cross-referenced.

With thousands of pieces of information being added daily – whether through Adler’s soon-to-be patented scannable bar code technology or by docking Palm Pilots into cradles at the end of a day – Adler said his company holds some of the most pertinent pieces of voter information just a few short months before Nov. 2 – Election Day.

“The scale is unprecedented,” Adler said. “These key undecided voters, and there aren’t many of them, are being targeted by both parties. Come Election Day, we’re going to play a huge role in one of the biggest get-out-and-vote drives ever in this country by being able to see alongside exit polling who’s come out and voted already.”

Since Iowa’s caucuses, business has spread mostly by word-of-mouth. Adler said one of the recent sales he was especially proud of was to Michigan’s Democratic Party, which had been offered a copy of a competitor’s online voter system for free through the national party.

“They took a look at it and decided there wasn’t as much flexibility and it didn’t offer the unlimited number of attributes our system can provide,” Adler said. Recently, technology was added to the Palm Pilots some networks use for data entry, allowing for canvassers to have immediate access to mapping capabilities, or a series of short “talking points” geared to a particular voter.

Over the last year, the duo has taken on another four employees, all programmers to continue the constant evolution of the software and networked system.

Post-election, Adler said both men believe they’ll be able to find new business on a fairly large scale for databased surveying distributed over the Web for marketing purposes.