Because that money wasn't spent to get people to turn out and vote. It was ad money spent to get to people to either ignore the issues at hand in favor or evoking some sort of emotion, to get the people that DO vote to vote for the person who's name they've heard the most, or to hate both major candidates so much they don't bother to vote.

When was the last time you saw a polical ad that defined a candidate's position on an issue, why they felt that way and what they wanted to do to fix/change/maintain it, instead of talking about how the other candidate was wrong?

$200 million may be a joke, but it's not a bad first year budget to START the project. What are they going to spend to complete the project, maintain it, and how much money will get hidden in other departmental budgets is the question. If the FBI mines the database for information, the FBI budget will contain the labor costs, etc.

Sadly, our intelligence agencies already collect more information than they can possibly absorb. An efficient data mining system has the potential to be horrifying. Right now I'm working on automated quality control measures to assign a reliability/risk factor to vendors we might place orders with based on past performance. If the risk factor gets too high, they get red-tagged not to use them.

How'd you like your government datafile to automatically assign a "risk factor" to your profile, and if the risk gets too high, you're red-tagged for monitoring or questioning? Maybe they'll call it a "patriotism" meter. Who decides what's risky? Does a police officer get to ding your file if they think you were rude when they stopped you for speeding? Who decides what's patriotic? Will potential employers get access to your file? How about creditors?

Yikes. Only fascists should find this kind of "security" comforting. Or people who believe that government us, by nature, always trustworthy and wouldn't EVER violate the public trust. Ha!