Email a List of Candidates to Voters

Overseas voters with Vote-By-Mail requests for an election are entitled to receive a list of the candidates for an election no later than 30 days prior to the election. From Vote-By-Mail > Vote-By-Mail Utilities, you can email the list to voters who are eligible to vote in the election and who have an email address on theVote-By-Mailtab in their record.

Note: Emails sent to voters using this feature are noted on the voter's Audit tab.

For the email feature to work, the parameters for your email system must be set up in VOTER FOCUS ADMIN > System Options > Email. The email addresses that are added to the Sender Address list are then available for selection when emailing the candidate list.

You provide the list of candidates in an attachment to the email. The list is not generated by Voter Focus; it must be created by the county. We suggest you use a file format that most recipients can open, such as TXT. The file can be stored in any folder accessible to the person who is sending the email. The default location where the program looks for the file is \Vr6Sharedbinaries\Export, but storing it there is not required.

The message in the email, including any links, is taken from the file:

I:\Vr6Sharedbinaries\EmailListOfCandidatesMsg.txt

You can edit this file to customize the message for your county.

Before emailing a candidate list, we recommend you read Verify the Success of Outgoing Emails.

  1. Ensure that the election you want is in focus.
  2. Go to Vote By Mail > Vote-By-Mail Utilities > Send Emails of Candidate Lists to Voters.
    3. Note: If you see the message: To process emails, the Email System Parameters must be set up. Stopping program., it means the parameters for your email system are not set up correctly in VOTER FOCUS ADMIN > System Options > Email. This must be done in order to send mass emails. See your system administrator if you need help with this setup.
  3. On the Email List of Candidates dialog, in the From Address field, select the email address at your office where you want replies to be sent, including unable-to-deliver notices. (If you don't see the address you want, go to VOTER FOCUS ADMIN > System Options > Email and add the address to the Sender Address list.
  4. In the CC Email Address field, enter an address to which the emails will be copied. (Only one CC address can be entered.) Using a CC address lets you keep a record of the voters who were sent this email. Or you can use the CC address for testing, as described in step 9, below.

  5. The Subject field is pre-filled with the text:Candidate List for <election name> (<election date>)

where <election name> is the election you selected when you started the process

and <election date> is the date of the selected election.

You can change the text in this field to anything you like.

  1. The Message field is pre-filled with text from the file:

I:\Vr6Sharedbinaries\EmailListOfCandidatesMsg.txt

You can edit the text in the file or on the screen. (Changes to the screen text are used for the current session only and are not saved; nor are they copied to the file.)

  1. Click Browse and find the file containing the list of candidates for this election. Verify that the path name is entered in the Attachment field.
  2. If you already sent a list for this election to voters, you can choose to resend the list to all voters who are eligible to receive the email or just to those who haven't received it yet. Select Send to Voters who have already received an email for this election to send the email to all eligible voters.
  3. The buttons in the Email Testing Runs box let you send test emails to the CC address without affecting any voter records. Click Send One Email to CC Address to send just one email. To send all emails, click Send Emails only to CC Address. To send a limited number of emails, enter the number in Maximum Emails to Send and click Send Emails only to CC Address.
  4. If you want to limit the number of emails going out at one time, enter a maximum number for this transmission in Maximum Emails to Send. You can use this field along with the Send to Voters who have already received an email for this election field to send these emails in batches. After sending the first batch, be sure the Send to Voters who have already received an email for this election is cleared, so subsequent batches will not repeat transmissions to voters who were sent emails in the first batch.
  5. Click Send Emails to send the list of candidates to voters. You will see a message at the bottom of the dialog indicating how many emails were sent in this transmission. When you see the message Generated n emails (complete), the email transmission is complete. You can send another batch or click Cancel to dismiss the dialog.