Seattle Weekly staff writer Curtis Cartier has posted a file containing over 100,000 scanned petitions from a 2009 referendum effort by the anti-gay marriage group Protect Marriage Washington.

After a long battle by gay-rights advocates to release the signatories, the file became available online last week:

The only reason that the names haven’t been published to the web yet (at least anywhere I can find) is likely because the format is so horribly un-user friendly that looking through the list for anything less then a weekend would be futile.

Essentially the names are image (.tiff) files of the scanned petitions. Thousands and thousands of images.

Cartier invites readers to “feel free to put some pajamas on, pour a nice scotch, and curl up with 2.7 gigabytes of democracy.”