The reason is that Advokit creates its own id number for each voter record, and that is what all functionality within Advokit keys on. When you import new voter records, even if you have deleted the old records, they will have different id numbers, and any information that you have recorded with respect to those voters (contact lists, contact results, contact history, questionnaire responses, etc) will no longer be connected to them. So to merge updated voter data with the data that is already in Advokit, you would have to copy the voter-related tables from the Advokit database, perform your list merging on them in an external database environment (preserving Advokit's voter id), and then restore those tables into the database.

The only good news I can give you is that in the current development version (1x), the source voter_id can be mapped when you run a voterfile import, which at least lets you perform the external data merge operation with a solid voter id to match against.

Does anyone have a procedure documented for adding new voter records to their Advokit db? 

If they overlap any existing records, then you'll have to devise your own procedure outside of Advokit for merging your new voter data with the records already existing. We can discuss this further if you need to.

Non-duplicate voter records can be imported like normal, and they will link themselves to existing residence, mailaddress and respolis records where appropriate, or create new records where there is no match.

I am about to load advokit on my hosting service in preparation for Wake County Precinct organization.

I am going to try it out on my precinct first and then invite other precinct chairs to use it if I can organize it so it works well and is easy to use.

The issue Debbie mentioned above gives me some pause since it would be vital for us to update our voter files on a regular basis in an easy fashion.

Can you please discuss further exactly how you would go about doing this? It scares me to death to start messing with the tables. last time I did that with another site I screwed it up royally.

Do you know of any other instances of this tool being used for precinct organization that you can point me to for some ideas on how to organize the site?

Thanks in advance.
Max in Raleigh
Precinct 18-04

If you intend to run your program as we do at PrecinctCaptains.org where activists are not just allowed, but even encouraged to update and enhance the voter data, then you will get a much more effective program. But it means you now have a real data management problem.

The first problem is indeed how to match voters in the current Advokit database that was loaded from an old CD with the new voter data records in your new CD. This have been a continual source of problems. Most counties have either an Affidavit number or a voter Id tag. But sometimes they switch from one to the other. Much too frequently one or the other is not even a unique value. All sorts of pragmatic hacks are needed to do this matching

The other problem is how do you load in new data for a voter without overwriting the data that activists have worked hard to gather and input. For ecxample, if an activist manages to get a voter's email address, then it must be preserved when they submit a new registration to change their absentee status. I am working on trying to put together a solution to this problem. It is quite complex and currently stands at a couple of thousand lines of SQL code.

It's doable if, when you imported your original voter data, you had a unique persistent ID number for each voter and mapped that to Advokit's "id_from_voterfile" field. Only then is it practically possible to combine new data with old data. I'm not referring to something that you can do with Advokit tools - this would need to be done using tools on your PC and/or on the server. It's not hard though, and with some simple precautions (i.e. always work on a copy of your working data), you can avoid almost any conceivable risk.

I will be happy do my best to work through your particular voter data update problem with you. We can post our solution back here. Contact me at <my user name above> at gmail dot com.

-Pat

I'm about to embark on a fairly large project for my precinct, a congressional candidate, a few democratic groups, and a county democratic party. Essentially, we need to be able to update our databases from what the other groups learn and from the new voter files from the State Board of Elections, give the different groups different levels of trust when merging, and a ton of other shuffling around.

Our problem is that we have a lot of Democratic groups here who want to do their own thing and I'm trying to enable sharing of information between the groups while allowing them to maintain control over "their" information.

Besides, if you are running in a contested primary and both candidates in the primary are running advokit, there should be a way of merging the voter ID databases from the losing primary candidates and with the winning candidate's database. (Of course, this assumes friendly post-election relations which is something outside the realm of advokit.)

So yeah... If you want to talk to me about what I'm working on (of course, any code I write, goes back to the community [which I do love, by the way, Free software is what got me into politics]).

My e-mail address is my username on this site at gmail.com.

Jared Lash

Advokit's already pretty good about allowing you to manage access to your voting population and access to data that you collect about voters in a fairly flexible and fine-grained way. And of course it's open source, so if you need to change the way Advokit works, the sky is the limit. The real question in my mind is whether the number of voters and users can practically be handled under a single Advokit instance.

I'll contact you offline and hopefully post summaries of what we figure out together here so everyone else can follow along.

-Pat

"So yeah... If you want to talk to me about what I'm working on (of course, any code I write, goes back to the community [which I do love, by the way, Free software is what got me into politics])."

Yay! Glad to have you on board!