IV3 - June Newsletter

IV3 Newsletter | June 2022

Hi, I’m Cole Hughes, True the Vote’s Executive Director.We are grateful to all of you for signing up for IV3 and joining us as we continue to build out the app, establish best practices, grow an unstoppable grassroots movement, and work towards clean voter rolls and election integrity across the country!Going forward, we’ll use the IV3 newsletter to keep you in the loop on important IV3 updates and feature releases, new state additions, and other relevant news.  You may have noticed that Facebook and Instagram are banning or limiting TTV and IV3 content, so in addition to the newsletter we’ve started a True the Vote Locals community where we’ll share additional IV3 information. Be sure to check Locals for special live events, to participate in Q&As, and to connect with like minded citizens from around the country. We are really excited about the future of IV3 and the community that is growing with us! For today, I want to quickly cover where we are with the IV3 program and what you can look forward to over the weeks and months ahead – including submitting challenges to your counties. First, we’ve learned some tough lessons. We realized when we set out to build a web-based app that enables citizens to review and report on their local voter rolls, we were doing something that had never been done before and we would likely encounter, well, challenges along the way. We’ve found that building a scalable app and national program designed to be compliant with both state and federal laws and local processes is extremely difficult. Not impossible, but definitely difficult.  For example, Ohio issued an opinion that NCOA alone is insufficient to grant a challenge, so we had to alter our process to accommodate the inclusion of additional data points.  Texas may require a signed statement from each challenger, so we had to build out a workflow to support that requirement. County officials in many states have declined to give us direct answers on how we can best facilitate challenges in their counties, so we've had to ask repeatedly.  It has been an uphill battle, but we are figuring it out!Second, we're adding functionality slowly but surely.  Many of you signed up some months ago, but we've yet to add your state's voter roll data.  Or maybe we have your state data, but only have a residency query for your review. Please keep the faith!  Our plans are to continue to expand and enhance the platform.  At scale, we expect to support all state rolls, include a variety of queries, and be open to citizens and government workers alike.  A few basics. In order to challenge an ineligible voter record, the challenger must also be a registered voter in the same county as the voter record they are challenging.  When you complete a challenge in IV3, that challenge is not automatically sent to your county. Our team is working county by county to determine the best method of submitting challenges in our active states, according to each state’s laws and county processes. When we submit challenges, the county receives the challenger’s name and identifying information, the record(s) being challenged, and the reason for challenge. Your local elections administrators and boards will follow their established processes for reviewing challenges and determining how they will proceed. This may include a public meeting and vote on whether to take up the challenges. As we kick off challenge deliveries we’ll email you, push notifications to IV3, and post content on truethevote.org and True the Vote Locals. It’ll be important to watch for any communication from us or your local elections board and to monitor the board’s announcements and public meeting agendas for mentions of challenges or other references to voter rolls. Looking ahead, the federal National Voter Registration Act (NVRA) prohibits voter roll maintenance within 90 days of a federal election, so our goal is to complete submissions and wrap up the majority of our Midterm work by Friday, August 5th. After the 5th, we’re going to take IV3 offline for a few months, while we expand coverage and functionality. Planned additions and features include: 

• adding more state data

• adding more queries for identifying records to be reviewed

• gamification features

• automations to improve efficiency and performance. 

 The last (for now!) big addition coming to IV3 after the Midterms are TTV Sentinels, our IV3 Field Team!  Sentinels will be in a position to help you with questions, they’ll oversee organizing at the state and local level, and track laws and rules impacting elections and processes in your state. I am excited for the future of IV3, and I am honored to be on this journey with each of you.  On behalf of our entire team of developers and staff, thank you! 

Onward!

Cole HughesExecutive DirectorTrue the Vote