Create Book Closing Totals

As you know, State law requires that voter registration books be closed on the 29th day before each election and remain closed until after the election. There is a grace period after book closing to allow the Supervisors to register voters whose applications were submitted prior to book closing. Book closing totals are collected at a point after the grace period expires. The totals are computed using the voter registration status (only Active voters are included), party, precinct, registration date, and birth date found in voter records at the time the data was collected.

After the book closing totals have been taken, the book closing reports will be available in ELECTIONS > Election Reports > Book Closing. If you attempt to run a book closing report before totals have been taken, you will see an error message when you try to run the report.

For statewide elections, the Division of Elections defines when book closing occurs and tabulates book closing totals for all counties across Florida. These totals are not retrieved into county databases. Should you receive an external request for book closing totals, refer the requester to the Division of Elections, as that office is the registrar of voter registration records.

For internal use, you should capture your book closing totals as near as possible to the time the Division takes theirs.

In local elections, the county is responsible for generating book closing totals. The totals are stored in the county database, and book closing reports can be run at any time after that. This relieves you of the necessity of archiving the reports in order to save the book closing data.

Before running Book Closing Totals, verify that the following tasks have been done:

Set election status to Active—On the Election Maintenance dialog, verify that Election Status Code is Active. If it isn't Active, see Change an Election's Status.

Activate 18-year-olds—Be sure to activate all pre-registered voters who will be 18 years old on or before election day. Activation should be done before FVRS is brought down to capture book closing totals. See Activate Voters Who Will Be 18 on Election Day for instructions.

In the Latest Date of 18th Birthday field, be sure to enter the date of the election.

Note: Do not activate pre-registered voters if FVRS is down. Wait until the state system is communicating before performing this task.

Inactivate voters who haven't responded to a Final Notice—Consider running the Inactivate Voters Batch Run program, which takes voters who were sent a Final Notice (due to undeliverable mail) more than 30 days ago and have not responded.

Run Integrity Check—It's important to run the Integrity Check program and resolve any issues you find before creating your book closing totals.

Stop FVRSNotes—Just prior to creating the book closing totals, stop the FVRSNotes program so your totals will be as stable as possible. If FVRSNotes is running, voters could be shifting while you are capturing the totals. To stop FVRSNotes, on the computer where it is running, go to VOTER FOCUS ADMIN > FVRSNotes and click Close on the FVRSNotes dialog.

To tabulate and save book closing totals:

  1. Ensure that the correct election is the focused election. If not, click Change Election Status on the Console and select the election.
  2. Verify that the election status is Active.
  3. Verify that the FVRSNotes program is not running on your system.
  4. Go to ELECTIONS > Maintain Election Settings > Book Closing > Generate Book Closing Totals. The totals will be tabulated and saved to the database. This involves inserting a record for every eligible voter into a special book closing table. Depending on your county size and server capacity, tabulation might take a few minutes.

    5. In addition, the button label changes from Generate Book Closing Totals to RERUN Book Closing Totals to remind you that, if you retake the totals, you will be overwriting the totals from the previous run. Doing a rerun deletes the previous totals from the database and creates new ones from the voter registration data in its current state. If you do rerun the totals, remember that any book closing reports already printed and archived may be invalidated.

  5. Restart FVRSNotes by going to VOTER FOCUS ADMIN > FVRSNotes.

The book closing reports can be run at any convenient time. They need not be run immediately because the totals remain in the database and will not change unless you do a rerun. The reports are listed under ELECTIONS > Election Reports > Book Closing.

Even though the book closing data remains in the database, we recommend that you run the book closing reports and archive them in accordance with your county procedures. The Voter Focus system should not be used as an archive of book closing reports for elections long past.

Storing master copies in paper format is one option for archival storing. The reports can also be stored on your Voter Focus server or the I drive. We suggest you create an archival folder where reports pertaining to each election are stored in subfolders.

The best way we have found to save the reports in a format that resembles the original report is by using Microsoft Excel (XLS or XLSX) or Adobe Acrobat (PDF) format. Other format options are RPT (can be read by Crystal Reports), and DOC (Microsoft Word). RTF (rich text format) can be read by a number of applications including Microsoft Word, but in our test samples, the date and time information was garbled. It is important to remember that file formats can become obsolete, so be sure that old files can be read by your current software. If not, re-export them to a newer format.

  1. Run the report.
  2. On the report taskbar, click the export icon to open the Export Report dialog.
  3. In the Save as type field, select the format compatible with the application in which you'll be accessing the report.
  4. Click Save.
  5. Run the application and open the exported file to verify you saved the information you wanted.