Sample Ballot Export Files for Commercial Printers

It's an extract of county voter information that can be delivered to a commercial printing/mailing house for the preparation of sample ballot mailouts to voters. The file lists all voters who are eligible to vote in a specified election, except:

  • Voters who have been sent a mail ballot.
  • Voters who have early voted.

You have the option of excluding voters whose registration status is Inactive, thus restricting the mailing to Active voters only.

Voters who have requested delivery of their sample ballot by email are included in the file. If you want to remove them, you will need to manually remove them before delivering the file to the printer.

Sample ballot files are typically produced after book closing, but this is not required by Voter Focus.

To save printing and mailing costs, you can combine voters residing at the same address into a single household mailing, so the household receives only one sample ballot. This way of organizing a sample ballot mailout is known as household sorting.

The sample ballot file includes each voter’s name or their household name, various pieces of data from the voter registration record, the residential address, mailing address, district assignments, and precinct. The file also includes directions to the polling place.

The voter’s ballot style is included unless you use household sorting. Ballot styles are omitted from export files sorted by household because of the possibility that voters in a household could be affiliated with different political parties and would therefore need multiple ballot styles. So, all voters in the export file receive the same sample ballot, which typically shows all races. If you want to send voters a sample ballot reflecting only the races for their particular ballot style, you can still use household sorting, provided that the election has no party races. For this approach, you will need to create a separate export file for each ballot style, including only the precincts to which the ballot style is assigned.

You can have Voter Focus output the export file as a straight text (TXT) file or compressed in a ZIP file. If you decide on a ZIP file, we recommend you also choose the option to create a work file, which is simply an uncompressed copy of the export file. Before sending the file to the commercial printer, you’ll need to examine it for errors. Having an uncompressed version to check makes this step a bit easier.