An Overview of NCOA Maintenance
The Florida statute governing biennial list maintenance allows voter address changes to be supplied by an NCOALINK licensee of the USPS in lieu of a mass mailing. Address changes from NCOA vendors are recorded in voter records as third-party address changes.
The complete list of Active and PreReg voters plus address must be submitted to the NCOA vendor, not just those who have had no activity. The exception report returned by the vendor will contain address changes for the entire Active-voter roster. Although this is likely to result in more data entry than a mailing, you can be confident that your Active-voter addresses will be as up-to-date as possible for the next election cycle.
To work with an NCOA vendor and process the data they
provide:
- Prepare a file of voters for delivery to the vendor. This procedure is explained in Prepare a File of Voter Addresses for an NCOA Vendor.
- After you receive the vendor's file of address changes, load the NCOA data into a Microsoft® Excel spreadsheet, following the format described in NCOA Spreadsheet Format. This step is not performed using Voter Focus, but it is a necessary prerequisite for Voter Focus to process the NCOA data.
- Process the data from an import file into your voter registration
database. This is a three-step process:
Import the spreadsheet or import the ERIC NCOA file into Voter Focus.
Process the address changes in the spreadsheet that involve only ZIP+4® additions to existing zip codes and voters who moved without a forwarding address. These changes are not presented to the user one-by-one; they are processed as a batch and automatically applied to voter records. See Process ZIP+4 Changes from an NCOA Vendor for instructions.
Process the remaining address changes. In this step, each change is presented to the user for confirmation. See Process Address Changes from an NCOA Vendor for instructions.
See Processing of NCOA Address Changes for more information on processing of files returned by the NCOA vendor.
