Capitalization of Names and Addresses
The Force Ucase Name/Addr option in SYSTEM MAINTENANCE > System Options > System Options controls whether names and addresses are uppercased or proper-cased. This option is set by VR Systems when a Voter Focus system is installed and it should not be changed by the county. If you think your county should change this setting, contact VR Systems.
Most counties have the Force Ucase Name/Addr option turned off, and so their names and addresses are proper-cased. This means that the first letter of the name is uppercased and the remaining letters are lowercased, like this:
Washington
Proper-casing makes names more readable on precinct registers
Certain letter combinations within names cause internal letters to also be proper-cased. The letter following these initial letters:
|
Mc |
for example: |
McLean |
|
Mac |
|
MacArthur |
|
O' |
|
O'Neal |
are automatically capitalized, as is the letter following a space within a name, such as De Soto.
The proper-casing of voter names happens on the Find a Voter dialog when you tab out of a voter name field and on the application form when you tab out of the Street Name field of the residential address, or the Country field. If you are creating a new voter record, the voter name will initially appear as proper-cased on the application form. If the casing does not match the way the voter provided their name or street name, you can change the capitalization on the application form and the name will be displayed from then on with your revised casing.
Proper-casing is not universally applied to the following address fields:
Country names— Text in the Country field of mailing addresses is uppercased.
City names— The words APO, DPO, and FPO are uppercased. Otherwise only the first letter of each word is capitalized.
Address types— The words BOX, CR, HCR, HWY, PO, PO BOX, RR, SR, and US are uppercased. (On your system, the list of uppercased words might be slightly different from those listed here.) For all other words, only the first letter is capitalized.
State— State abbreviations are uppercased.
Street number suffix— Entries in the Suf field after the street number are uppercased.
Street direction and street direction suffix— These fields acquire the case of their listings in the code tables.
If your county uses propercase, but for absentee and mailing addresses you want letters to remain in the case in which they are entered, clear the system option Propercase AB/Mail Address. This allows you to enter such abbreviations as APO in uppercase into address fields and prevent the system from converting the text to propercase. You should be aware that, if you clear this option, the abbreviations APO, DPO, and FPO, will not be automatically uppercased in the City field, as they are when Propercase AB/Mail Address is selected.
