search

usnistgov / VoterRecordsInterchange

Common data format specification for voter records interchange data
https://pages.nist.gov/VoterRecordsInterchange
Other
14 stars 2 forks source link

Support for Voter Registration Lookups #7

Closed JDziurlaj closed 5 years ago

JDziurlaj commented 6 years ago

Voter Lookup Proposal

A consequence of the streamlined structure proposed in issue #6 (Ballot Requests) is voter information is now independent of a particular form used by a voter . A major advantage of this revised structure is that the same Voter class can be used in different contexts, such as registration, ballot request or lookup.

Prior versions of VRI did not explicitly support a lookup use-case. It was assumed that the response to such a VRI request would be in an implementation dependent format.

Proposed Changes

Add a new VoterRecordsResponse subtype, VoterRecords. Each VoterRecords object may contain zero or more VoterRecord instances. This structure is to handle a situation where a voter has multiple records, as well as where the lookup whose criteria was insufficiently precise to return a single voter. VoterRecord is a subtype of Voter with additional attributes to convey informational normally stored in a voter registration system, as:

Note: There is no voter status. It is assumed any record that comes back will be an eligible voter.

monicachilders commented 6 years ago

Re: "There is no voter status. It is assumed any record that comes back will be an eligible voter."

Is there any flexibility here? Voter reg systems have multiple statuses for these records (versions of active, pending, inactive, and declined are all common). It seems like it would be worth supporting these?

JDziurlaj commented 6 years ago

It does. But it's one of those things where we should probably have an enumeration for, and I'm not sure what those values should be. 'active' and 'inactive' come to mind, but 'inactive' means different things to different people. In Ohio 'inactive' meant "in an NVRA removal process, but still eligible to vote". I imagine other states will disagree. Thoughts, @pstenbjorn?

JDziurlaj commented 5 years ago

There are only three statuses in the proposed PR #9, active, and confirmation, and other