Efficient use of space in large table?

I was just wondering - I've got two large tables and I was wondering
if there is anyway to shrink them somewhat. I imagined compression for
non-indexed columns or something. Is varchar or char more efficient than
text? I'm sort of just grasping at straws for something to get the data
smaller.

Josh

A size summary
relname | size | type
------------------------+-------+----------
sospeople | 599MB | table
sospeople_fn | 71MB | index
sospeople_ln | 73MB | index
sospeople_zip | 73MB | index
votes | 937MB | table

Table "sospeople"
Attribute | Type | Modifier
------------------+---------+---------------------
sosid | text | not null default ''
countyname | text | not null
firstname | text |
middlename | text |
lastname | text |
suffix | text |
homephone | text |
registrationdate | text |
birthyear | integer |
status | text |
precinctcode | text |
housenumber | text |
streetname | text |
unittype | text |
unit | text |
address2 | text |
city | text |
state | text |
zipcode | text |
Indices: sospeople_fn,
sospeople_ln,
sospeople_zip

Table "votes"
Attribute | Type | Modifier
------------+---------------+----------
sosid | character(10) |
electionid | integer |
votetype | character(1) |

Joshua b. Jore ; http://www.greentechnologist.org