Election & Vacancies Detection Unit (EVDU) is responsible for making sure that, at all times, our website reflects who will be on the ballot for each election. This ensures that voters are provided with a full picture of who is running for each office, and what they will ultimately see in the voting booth. Election Monitors track and update all elections, candidates, and election results.
Monitoring elections are the first step in the PCT Process. We make the lists that the rest of the department depends on for mailings, candidate contacts, and press reports. The Research Department and VoteEasy researchers rely on EVDU's candidate lists to determine who they should conduct research for.
The core duties of EVDU are finding and entering candidate lists, and keeping these lists updated through primaries, runoffs, recalls, candidate filing deadlines, withdrawals, deaths, appointments, and any other possible changes candidates may go through. To keep up with these changes, we rely on the election officials for each state. These websites can be incredibly useful, but sometimes questions arise. When in doubt, call or email the election officials. They're nice (generally) and knowledgeable (almost as frequently) and if they don't know the answers, no one does.
Nearly as vital as maintaining the candidate lists is communication with other members of the department. The Elections & Candidates Research Director needs to know the status of the lists, as well as what sort of intern/staff/member help EVDU needs on a daily basis. The director also has the final say on questions or solutions to problems that may arise.
Scope of Coverage
Management of Elections & Vacancies Detection Unit
How We Collect Candidates (Outdated as of 2016)
EVDU Tasks:
- Creating Calendars and Reporting Progress
- Maintaining Election Data
- Maintaining Candidate Rosters (Candidate Associations to Elections) (Outdated as of 2016)
- Finding and Preparing Candidate Lists
- Paying Special Attention to Presidential Candidates and Judicial Candidates
- ++CandidateListImport Importing Candidate Lists++(No longer done) or Entering Candidate Lists
- Updating Candidate Lists
- Adding Relationships to Candidates' Elections (Runningmates)
- Defining "Major" Candidates for Inclusion in Presidential VoteEasy and for Highlighting in Our Communications
- Processing Election Results
- Tracking Exception Candidates
- Monitoring and Resolving Duplicates (Will be updated by database specialist)
- It is the solemn responsibility of EVDU to find articles that use Vote Smart data and share them immediately with the relevant research division, National Director, and with Development and Communications.
- Additionally, EVDU should have access to Google Analytics to understand and communicate and tedency or changes in the behavior of users on the Vote Smart website or any other programs.
: +Updating Contact Information and Biographical Information , , finding zip codes, email addresses, campaign websites
Updating Biographies for Candidates- Check Offices Tab and Elections Tab- Add Candidacies (if they lost the election) and Office Information under Political Experience if it is not already there. Go to Campaign website(s) and office website(s) to find Biographical Information. Follow Bio Guidelines
Resources
