How to

Obtain Petition Totals by Congressional District

This topic explains how to export petition-signature data to Microsoft Excel and then manipulate the spreadsheet to obtain totals of petition signatures by congressional district.

Alternatively, you can obtain this information from the Petition Status Report.

To create an Excel file totaling petition signatures by congressional district:

1. On the PETITIONS tab, verify that the petition is in focus. If not, change the focus to the correct petition. It doesn't matter which petition batch is in focus.

2. Click Petition Reports > Flexible Petition List and select the fields shown here.

Report Layout = Export Disk File

Batch Selection + All Petition Batches

Signatures Selected = Accepted

Date Signature Processed = Starting and ending dates for the date range you want to report on.

Click OK.

3. On the Name Format for Labels/Diskette dialog, select the voter-name you want and click OK.

4. The Windows Open dialog appears with a default file name and location. You can accept the defaults or change the name and location. Click Open to create the file. This might take a few moments, depending on the size of the file. When the file is ready, you will see a message indicating the number of records written to the file. Click OK.

5. Start Microsoft Excel and open the file you just created. (To see your file, you might have to select All Files (*.*) in the Files of type field.)

6. On the Text Import Wizard -Step 1 of 3 dialog, select Delimited and click Next.

7. On the Wizard's Step 2 of 3 dialog, select Comma. Then click Finish. You should see the congressional districts in column F. If a row in this column is blank, it is because the voter's address is protected.

8. Highlight column F and click Data > Sort on the Excel menu to sort the results by congressional district. Then use the auto-sum feature to total the petitions for each district.