Last Update: April 23, 2014 |
The Florida statute governing biennial list maintenance allows voter address changes to be supplied by an NCOALINK licensee of the USPS in lieu of a mass mailing. Address changes from NCOA vendors are recorded in voter records as third-party address changes.
The complete list of Active and PreReg voters plus address must be submitted to the NCOA vendor, not just those who have had no activity. The exception report returned by the vendor will contain address changes for the entire Active-voter roster. Although this is likely to result in more data entry than a mailing, you can be confident that your Active-voter addresses will be as up-to-date as possible for the next election cycle.
To work with an NCOA vendor and process the data they provide, you will need to:
Prepare a file of voters for delivery to the vendor. This procedure is explained in How to Prepare a Files of Voter Addresses for an NCOA Vendor.
After you receive the vendor's file of address changes, load the NCOA data into a Microsoft® Excel spreadsheet, following the format described in NCOA Spreadsheet Format. This step is not performed using Voter Focus, but it is a necessary prerequisite so that Voter Focus can process the NCOA data.
Process the data from the spreadsheet into your voter registration database. This is a three-step process:
Import the spreadsheet into Voter Focus. See How to Import NCOA Response Data into the Processing Queue for instructions.
Process the address changes in the spreadsheet that involve only ZIP+4® additions to existing zip codes and voters who moved without a forwarding address. These changes are not presented to the user one-by-one; they are processed as a batch and automatically applied to voter records. See How to Process ZIP+4 Changes from an NCOA Vendor for instructions.
Process the remaining address changes. In this step, each change is presented to the user for confirmation. See How to Process Address Changes from an NCOA Vendor for instructions.
See About Processing of NCOA Address Changes for more information on processing of files returned by the NCOA vendor.
Reports provided by Voter Focus in support of NCOA processing include: