RAW ABSENTEE & EARLY VOTE DATA IN VAN: OVERVIEW
As Kentucky’s Votebuilder instance moves forward to 2022 - along with 2021 special elections - the data team has migrated the raw absentee and early vote data into a custom field for future accessibility.
STANDARD EARLY VOTING SECTION:
Ahead of each new campaign cycle, the ‘Early Voting’ section in VAN must be cleared and populated with information for the next election. With three special elections for state legislative seats called for November 2, 2021, the 2020 General Election will be cleared from this section.
To allow candidates and county parties to easily access the raw data found in this section, a Custom Field has been created labeled “2020 AVEV General Election”.
In “2020 AVEV General Election”, users will be able to search for those voters who requested ballots, returned ballots, or voted early (in person).
Additionally, under each voters record, users will be able to see the exact dates, as shown below:
RAW ABSENTEE & EARLY VOTE DATA IN VAN: LIST BUILDING
Similar to the “Early Voting” section, users will be able to build lists of voters by searching on the options available under the “Select a date range” drop down.
When searching on this dataset, users will be able to select both the “Ballot Request Date” and “Ballot Return Date” to find voters who requested and returned ballots. In the example below, we are looking for voters who requested an absentee ballot whose ballot was marked as returned by the county clerk on or after Election Day.
RAW ABSENTEE & EARLY VOTE DATA IN VAN: OTHER NOTES
One important thing to keep in mind with this dataset is that this is the RAW data from the State Board of Elections and IS NOT the official vote history.
Official vote history comes from the voter file from the State Board of Elections as “Voter Credit” (please refer to “VOTE HISTORY IN VAN: METHODOLOGY” for additional information).
Full documentation: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1uJUcHH3Da1dbOVAo4-s70EOu4KmFdvJAFK-vS2pADJ4/edit?usp=sharing