How to

Send Vote-by-Mail Notifications

Florida law requires Supervisors of Elections to send notices to mail-ballot voters to help them stay informed about their mail-ballot request or ballot. The Vote-by-Mail Notifications feature lets you easily find the affected voters and send out the notices automatically. The feature consists of three runs, each of which should be run daily:

Free Access Notification—This run advises voters of their ability to find their mail-ballot request/ballot status on the Supervisor of Elections website. The system will find mail-ballot voters who:

• Requested a mail ballot by one of these methods:

Email

Fax

FPCA

Mail

Third party

• Have not been notified of this "free-access system" within one year of the date when they were last sent a notification.

Note  To determine if a voter has received a free-access notification within the last year's time period, the system counts 13 months from the date the last notification was sent to the voter, with the month of the send date being the first month in the count. If the voter received a notification within those 13 months, they will not be scheduled for another one. So if the last notification was sent on September 15, 2015, and you do a run on September 16, 2016, the voter will not be included in the run. They will, however, be included in runs on and after October 1, 2016.

Voters with email addresses in their voter registration record receive the notice by email. The emails are sent out as part of the notification run. It's not necessary for you to email each voter individually.

Note  Emails cannot be sent to voters from any database other than the production database. From the Training database, emails can be sent to the address in VOTER FOCUS ADMIN > System Options > Email > Sender/Reply to Email Address.

For voters who don't have email addresses, the run schedules them to receive the notice via a postcard mailing. To create the postcards, you print them from the Notices Queue. The postcard notice is set up as a form under the name Abs Inf Notn PostCard. You will need to modify the form to suit your county's needs. If you prefer to create labels rather than a form, change the Document Type to Labels and modify the layout as necessary.

The run begins by creating an onscreen report of the affected voters. The report is divided into two sections: email and postcard. It's important to check the email list in particular, to verify that all email voters have valid email addresses. If you find an email address that isn't valid, you will need to delete it from the voter's record so that they will receive the notification by postcard.

When you are satisfied that the report contains no issues, we strongly recommend that you print or save it as a PDF. This is important because, if an email address cannot be found, the message you receive citing the delivery failure will not include any information about the voter other than their email address. Since email addresses don't always include the person's name, having a list of the recipients gives you a way to easily find the records of those whose email address failed.

After printing/saving the report, you can then instruct the system to send the emails and schedule the postcards.

The emailing process checks the email addresses before sending them to verify proper syntax, such as an @ sign before the domain name. This doesn't guarantee that every email address is valid—some might be returned as undeliverable as mentioned above—but it will identify those that cannot be mailed by your SMTP server. At the end of the emailing process, you will see a message listing the email addresses where the outgoing transmission failed. The list will include the voter ID associated with each failed email address. We recommend you copy the list and paste it into a work file; then research each address to verify its validity. For the ones that appear to be valid, you can resend each one by going to the voter's Comm tab and double-clicking the email notification item in the communications list. If the email fails again, we recommend you remove the email address from the voter's record so that they will be scheduled for a postcard in the next Free Access Notification run. If you prefer to leave the email address in the voter's record, you will need to manually schedule a postcard for the voter.

The Free Access Notification run is a resource-intensive program, so we recommend you run it on a quiet system The state of a county's Voter Focus system when there are no users on the system and the Fab Five programs are shut down. Certain Voter Focus maintenance programs should be run on a quiet system. The Voter Focus documentation notes when the execution of a program requires a quiet system. or at a time when most users are off the system.

UOCAVA Absentee Request Acknowledgment—This run emails UOCAVA A ballot requested by/delivered to a U.S. citizen who: (1) is a member of the uniformed services or the merchant marine who is deployed overseas or deployed domestically away from their county of residence, (2) is a dependent family member of a service member/merchant marine and is away from their home county due to military deployment, or (3) resides outside the United States. These voters may cast an FWAB and they are eligible to receive ballots by email or fax. In the Voter Focus system, UOCAVA is a flag applied to a vote-by-mail ballot, not to voters themselves, since a voter's UOCAVA status can vary from election to election. voters when their mail-ballot request has been received and entered into the voter's record. The voter must have an email address in their record to receive this notice. The run begins by creating an onscreen report of the affected voters with their email addresses. If the information in the report is correct, you can then tell the system to send the emails.

UOCAVA Absentee Ballot Returned Acknowledgment—This run emails UOCAVA voters when their mail ballot has been received and recorded in the system as returned. The voter must have an email address in their record to receive this notice. The run begins by creating an onscreen report of the affected voters with their email addresses. If the information in the report is correct, you can then tell the system to send the emails.

Be aware that the ballot-returned-acknowledgement run looks at all elections with a status of Active or Return Processing Only. If, in a past election, you stopped doing the run even though ballots were still being returned, when you resume the daily runs, emails will go out to voters who returned ballots in the past election but did not receive an acknowledgement. Receipt of this acknowledgement weeks or months after an election could be disconcerting to voters, so we suggest you set the past election's status to Closed before resuming the daily ballot-returned-acknowledgement runs.

Note  See About the UOCAVA Flag for more information on UOCAVA voters.

The emails and postcard communications generated by these three runs are noted on the Comm tab in voter records.

The content of each of these notices is taken from the following text files in \VR6Sharedbinaries:

You can create the files yourself or you can allow Voter Focus to create them for you. If you create them yourself, be sure to save them under the files names indicated. If you choose not to create one or more of the files, Voter Focus will create the file the first time you perform the run. It will not overwrite an existing file, so if you provide your own file or edit the system-created file, your text will not be overwritten by subsequent runs. If you want to edit the system-created file and it does not exist yet, do the run but cancel out before updating the voter records. Then edit the file, save it under the same name, and repeat the run.

If you want to have the system insert the election name and date into the two acknowledgement emails (that is, Absentee Request Acknowledgement and Absentee Ballot Returned Acknowledgement), insert the following string into the file(s):

[Election Details]

When the emails are generated, the string will be replaced with the election name and date.

If you are editing one of the three text files above to include Spanish, Creole, or any language having accented or non-English characters, you must save the file with UTF-8 encoding so that the accented characters will be rendered properly in the email. To save a file in Notepad, click File > Save as and select UTF-8 in the Encoding field.

Before doing a vote-by-mail-notification run, we recommend you read How to Verify the Success of Outgoing Emails.

To send vote-by-mail notifications:

1.     If you are going to send the UOCAVA Absentee Ballot Returned Acknowledgment, ensure that the election you want is in focus. (The other two runs are not election-specific, so the focused election does not matter for those runs.)

2.     Go to VOTE BY MAIL > Vote-by-Mail Notifications.

3.     On the Vote-by-Mail Notifications dialog, click Run for the notice you want to send. The system will generate an onscreen report of the affected voters:

Report generated by Free Access Notification run

Report generated by UOCAVA Absentee Request Acknowledgment run

Report generated by UOCAVA Absentee Ballot Returned Acknowledgment run

4.     Examine the report to verify the information, particularly the email addresses, is correct. If any corrections are necessary, cancel out of the run, make the changes to voter records and repeat this procedure beginning with step 2.

5.     When you are certain the information in the report is correct, print or save the report so you will have it available later in case any emails cannot be delivered.

6.     Click OK on the Vote-by-Mail Notifications dialog to send the emails (and, for the Free Access Notification run, schedule the postcards).