Suspend a Voter Application

Sometimes a voter registration application needs to be put on hold because there is insufficient information to complete the application and allow the voter to become active. Or an individual from another county has submitted an NVRA form to your county and final processing must be completed by their resident county. With the Suspend feature, you can remove such applications from the normal flow of processing and suspend them TO an agency—either another Florida county, the Department of State, or your own county. When the necessary information becomes available, the application can then be processed by the resident county and the voter issued a voter information card.

This feature can also be useful for counties that scan voter registration applications first and then process the applications while viewing the scanned image. If an application's image needs to be rescanned for any reason, you can suspend the application to your county and then retrieve the application from the Suspense Queue to complete processing once the application has been rescanned.

Note See Why Are Voter Applications Suspended? for more about suspensions.

When you suspend an application, Voter Focus gives it the status Suspended and sends it to FVRS where it is assigned a suspense ID for tracking purposes. The suspended-to county or the Department of State will be notified of the suspended application and that agency will process the application from that point.

Applications suspended to your county are listed in the Suspense Queue. As you gather the information necessary to complete the application, you can access the application from the Suspense Queue and process it.

Note If the application is for an existing voter whose status is Ineligible or Deleted, Voter Focus does not allow the application to be suspended. You will need to reprocess the application as a new application.

To suspend an application:

Create an application for a new voter or access the application of an existing voter. Enter the information provided on the paper or scanned application form and click Save. (If the application needs to be rescanned, click FVRS Suspend and skip to step 3.)

If the application is required to be suspended to the resident county, Voter Focus will display a message to that effect.

If an out-of-county address cannot be verified, you will see a message giving you the option of suspending the application.

If you cannot verify the address locally, cancel the street-lookup dialog.

Click FVRS Suspend.
On the Suspense County Selection dialog, select Dept of State, your county, or the other county to suspend the application to, write an explanation for the suspension in the New Comments field, and click OK. FVRS will suspend the application, and then Voter Focus will display a message with the suspense ID.
On the paper application, write the voter or suspense ID in the OFFICIAL USE ONLY box. Note the county you are suspending to (or DOS) as well. Click OK.
If the paper application has not yet been scanned, scan it as a Communication Type C, Scanned Front of Card Image.
Index the scanned form to the suspended application.
Mail the application form to the suspended-to county or DOS. The suspended-to agency will see the application in their Suspense Queue and they will process the application from that point.

In the voter's record, you will see a log on the Audit tab indicating that the record is suspended. For existing voters, there will be no indication of their suspension on their Maint tab. They are considered local voters until their suspense record is processed by the suspended-to county.

What if I need to change an application after I’ve suspended it?

Go to VOTER REGISTRATION > Application Forms.
On the Find a Voter dialog, type the voter or suspense ID number in the Last-Name field and click Application Search.
Make the changes to the application and click FVRS Suspend.