Eligibility Maintenance Process

Eligibility maintenance is the process of removing from the registration rolls those voters who have become ineligible to vote due to one of these conditions:

  • The voter has a felony conviction without having their civil rights restored.

  • The voter has been adjudicated mentally incapacitated with respect to voting.

  • The voter is deceased.

  • The voter is not a U.S. citizen, is not of legal age to register, does not reside at their residential address of record, or is a fictitious person.

The State requires that removal of these voters be managed and tracked electronically, with each step in the process being reported to FVRS electronically. The eligibility maintenance process begins when a match record is created in association with the voter's registration record. The match record indicates what type of eligibility issue has been reported and where the voter is in the eligibility maintenance process.

Match records can be created by the State or FVRS or they can be initiated by the Supervisor of Elections's office using Voter Focus. Regardless of the initiating agency, a list of the currently active match records for your county can be found in the Eligibility Match Queue. From the queue, you can access a voter's record and perform eligibility maintenance on that voter.

To open the Eligibility Match Queue, go to:

VOTER REGISTRATION > Eligibility Match Queue

or

LIST MAINTENANCE > Eligibility Match Queue

You can sort the list by clicking on a column header. For example, to sort the list by match type, click the column header labeled Type. Sorting by match type is useful when you are interested in processing only matches of a certain type, such as Decease matches. After sorting the queue, double-click the first match record to open the voter's record with the Eligibility Maint tab displaying the voter's potential ineligibility items. Click the eligibility item (such as Decease) to open a dialog for processing the item. When you are finished processing that voter, click Close to return to the Eligibility Match Queue.

Users must have the permission MatchQueue to access the Eligibility Match Queue. The user permission EligibilityMaintenance also gives access to the Eligibility Match Queue as well as to the eligibility maintenance programs in List Maintenance.

Accessing a voter's record via the Eligibility Match Queue is not required for eligibility maintenance. If you know which voter you want to process, you can simply open their record and click the Eligibility Maint tab to see a list of their potential ineligibility items.

If FVRS is reporting there is any type of eligibility match against a voter, the Eligibility Maint tab in the voter's record will display an asterisk:

You must go to the Eligibility Maint tab—not the Eligibility Match Queue—to create a match record for a voter, to record a response from the voter, or to schedule/record a hearing.

Keep in mind that the eligibility maintenance process is solely for removal voters who are currently registered. It doesn't apply to persons who are attempting to register to vote. If you receive a voter registration application from an applicant who meets one of the ineligibility criteria mentioned above, you should simply deny the voter's application.

The remainder of this topic describes the different types of matches
and where to go for instructions on processing them.

For voters with a felony conviction who have not had their civil rights restored, the removal process starts in one of these ways:

or

  • The State creates the match record and sends your county a packet of electronic files containing the documentation on the felony conviction. A Notice of Potential Ineligibility for the voter when the match record enters the system. The voter's name will appear in the Eligibility Match Queue with the Type of NFEL (felon match initiated by the State). The packet of electronic files will be stored on your system in:

I:\Vr6Sharedbinaries\Felon Files\<felon's voter ID>

In these cases, you will need to continue the eligibility maintenance process as described in Continue the FVRS-Initiated Removal of Felons.

Note: Felon packets should not be moved from the folder cited above. You can copy the packets to a different location, if you wish, but the originals should remain in the folder where they were initially placed by the State.

How should the Supervisor deal with a voter who moves out of the county during the eligibility maintenance process? To find these voters, you should run the report Potentially Ineligible Voters Moved Out of County on a daily basis. This report lists voters currently undergoing eligibility maintenance who have moved out of your county.

If the eligibility documentation on the voter came from BVRS, you must notify BVRS within one week that the voter has moved. BVRS will then notify the new county and forward the electronic felon packet to them. The felon match will be removed from the Eligibility Match Queue with no further action required on your county's part.

On the other hand, if your county initiated eligibility maintenance against the felon, you must send the felony documentation to the voter's new county within one week. The voter's new county then has the option of initiating eligibility maintenance from the beginning, as if it had never been done in the voter's former county.

Note: Felony documentation for county-initiated matches, even if stored electronically, cannot be attached to the voter record and thus cannot "travel" with the voter record to the new county. Transmission of the documentation to the new county must be done manually (for example, by mail, email, or fax).

The processing of Decease matches depends on how the match record was initiated:

  • Decease matches initiated by the State will appear in the Eligibility Match Queue with the type designation of Decease. A notice to the voter or their family is not required to remove the voter when a Decease record originates with FVRS. See Process FVRS Decease Matches for instructions on removing these voters.
  • Decease matches initiated by the county. See Initiate Removal of a Deceased Voter) for instructions on removing these voters.

The county is responsible for initiating eligibility maintenance against voters with these potential ineligibility issues:

  • An adjudication of mental incapacity with respect to voting (using documentation provided by the State).
  • The voter is not of legal age, is not a U.S. citizen, is a fictitious person, or is listed in the voter registration rolls under an address that is not their legal residence in Florida.

For instructions on processing these voters, see Initiate the Removal of Felons and Others Who Might Be Ineligible.

FVRS regularly runs comparisons looking for voter registration records that might be duplicates of existing registrations. These potential duplicates are included in FVRS match queue with a type of Duplicate. See Process a Duplicate Registration Reported by FVRS for instructions on resolving duplicates.

The eligibility maintenance notices required to be sent to voters must be set up in PRINTING > Document Maintenance. A document layout for each eligibility maintenance notice—with the required notice and communication types—is provided as part of the Voter Focus software.

To complete the setup process, you will need to:

  1. Create a Microsoft Word mail-merge document for each notice, keeping the following requirements in mind:
    • The data source/recipient list for all mail-merge documents for eligibility maintenance must be MrgVoters.txt, which is located in your \Vr6Sharedbinaries folder on the I drive.
    • The name of the Word document can be anything you choose, but the extension must be DOC. (DOCX extensions are not currently supported.)
    • The file must be saved in the \DOCS folder under \Vr6Sharedbinaries.
  2. Enter the Word document's file name in the Mail Merge Options—Word Document Name field on the Document Maintenance dialog.

Be aware that notices can be scheduled regardless of whether the mail-merge document has been created and associated with the notice. You will see them in the list of notices ready for printing on the Notices Queue dialog, but they will not be printable until the setup described above is complete.

EligibilityMaintenance—Access the Eligibility Match Queue and run the eligibility maintenance programs in List Maintenance.

MatchQueue—Access the Eligibility Maintenance Queue.

VotersEligibilityMaintenance—Perform eligibility maintenance tasks on individual voter records.

These are run from LIST MAINTENANCE > Eligibility Maintenance > Eligibility Maintenance Reports.