February VoteSource Newsletter

Welcome to the February edition of the VoteSource Newsletter.

We are pleased to be back with some more exciting updates about the VoteSource system as we enter the new year!

Missed our last edition? Catch up by clicking here.

Or click here to browse all previous editions.

Postal Vote Drop Offs – Speaking to your area and ensuring Postal Voters Re-register

Below is an important update from the VoteSource Team concerning the upcoming 2026 Local Elections

In October 2023 significant changes were made to the way that Postal Votes are handled in the UK with respect to the length of time a Postal Vote can be held by an individual voter. This particular change has instituted that a Postal Vote can now be held by an elector for a maximum of 3 years.

Therefore, electors who applied for a postal vote after 31 October 2023 will only be able to hold their postal vote until the third January following the date their application was granted. Which, in practice, means that many postal voters that have applied during this time, and have not reapplied for their postal vote since, would be set to lose their postal vote in January this year (on the 31st).

So, why are we telling you this?

Due to the change in election law surrounding postal votes outlined above, we have had to change our practice surrounding how we handle postal voters on VoteSource. This is to say we have changed our practice from assuming that those individuals on VoteSource with a postal vote will continue to have said postal vote until the council informs us otherwise, to letting these postal vote marks drop off these electors to better reflect the time period now allowable for holding postal votes.

Because of this, since January of this year you will have seen the number of postal voters in your area decrease.

All of this we have been able to ascertain by speaking with councils across the country, and requesting new postal voter files from them where we can, so that we can accurately tell you where there will be a decrease in postal voters in your area.

Note, though, that not all councils will have supplied us with these files to date. Nonetheless, the postal vote drop off data we are providing you now is accurate and up-to-date data for every area we have been able to gather it for.

As some of these postal voters will be key to your election campaigns, and not all will be aware of the change in law meaning they no longer have a postal vote, it is therefore now essential you reach out to these individuals and make them aware of this and encourage them to re-register for a postal vote should they need it.

This will help you maximise your voter base for the upcoming Local Elections, and so is a key part of this year’s campaigning cycle.

How we can help you with this.

We at the VoteSource team understand that whilst it is essential that our association officer users reach out to those that have dropped off the postal vote register in their area, that it is difficult to always ascertain who this may be.

This is why we have been hard at work to produce the following new two Target Audience Tiles:

These two target audience tiles hold within them all the criteria you need to be able to target your voters who have dropped off the postal vote register since January, and so should be of essential use at this stage.

Each audience has the following criteria:

PV Recruitment - 2026 PV non-renewals

Includes:

• Everyone that has been marked as having fallen off the postal register.

• Who is an elector included in the Potential Conservative 1 or Potential Conservative 2 TVA.

  Excludes:

• Anyone who has a postal vote.

• Or constituents with a Last Known VI that is not Conservative leaning.

Postal Voter Recruitment 2026

Includes:

• Anyone who is included in the Potential Conservative 1 TVA.

  Or

• Anyone who is included in the Potential Conservative 2 TVA, AND, has been marked as having fallen off the postal register

  Excludes:

• Anyone who has a postal vote.

• Or constituents with a Last Known VI that is not Conservative leaning.

And, each audience can be selected for use by association officers by going to the ‘Target Audience’ section within the ‘Campaigns’ area of VoteSource, and selecting ‘New Target Audience’. The guide below will help detail how to do this, should you need any assistance with this:

Fundamentals – How to create a basic Target Audience - https://votesource.uk/support/helpcenter/viewarticle/357

Once you have created these audiences, you will be able to pull a mail merge from these to assist you in contacting the relevant individuals in your area, or create a campaign designed to advise the electors within the audience to re-register for their postal vote. This will help you ensure that every potential voter in your area is ready to vote for the upcoming elections.

We would, therefore, encourage our association officer users to conduct these campaigns as soon as possible.

And please remember, you may need to assist your constituents in re-signing up for their postal vote. Just recording a Postal Vote Request on VoteSource is not enough; the Postal Vote Request system is only designed to track postal vote interest in your area.

Should you need any assistance with any of this, please just let our Member Services Team know via email at memberservices@conservatives.com, or phone on 020 7984 8036 (Monday to Friday, 9am – 5pm).

New Releases; Welcome VoteSource 26!

The VoteSource team are pleased to announce that a new release has been made to the VoteSource system.

This release introduces a change to version numbers in our releases; we have now moved to year as the major version number, so please join us in welcoming VoteSource 26!

As with all releases, the VoteSource team strive to enhance the performance of the VoteSource system and bring it up to current best practice. Great work, as always, has gone into this, and we can confirm that these improvements have been made for you, as well as to the following areas:

• Improvements to online survey template thumbnails have been made, making online surveys as easy to use as possible and so help you maximise their use.
• An issue surrounding Canvass Cards not opening correctly on Apple Devices should now be rectified, and we thank our users for their patience with this.
• A new feature has been developed to enhance the messaging capabilities of VoteSource. Whilst this won’t affect our users directly, this will dramatically improve the ability of CCHQ to create membership messaging and so we are excited to announce this and ask our members to keep an eye on their emails for new and exciting messages going forward!
• Refinements to the VI scoring algorithm have been made to fine tune the VI’s generated from 0-10 canvassing, and so provide you with the most useful data for your campaigns.
• And many more enhancements are well on the way!

We are, therefore, pleased to bring this new update to you and we hope you continue to enjoy using VoteSource as we work to make it as beneficial to your campaigns as possible.

Annual Rollover 2025 is complete!

With all local authorities having now provided us with their Annual Rollover files, and the Data team successfully uploading these onto the VoteSource system, we can say that Annual Rollover is completed for 2025!

Completed in a considerably quick time given the amount of data provided to us (Over 47,000,000 Electors, 38,000 Polling Districts, and 382,000 Electoral Geography Links have been added so far in 2025’s rollover alone!), and with a match rate of over 97% of new data matching our existing constituent data, we can only conclude that this Annual Rollover has been as incredibly successful as ever.

And, we are also extremely pleased to confirm that our Data Team have added 1,232,240 New Electors to VoteSource in this Annual Rollover. New Electors, of course, means new voters to speak to, and we are proud that we can bring you so much new campaigning potential this year. So, why not canvass the new electors in your area today!

We thank our users for their patience as we brought this essential process to a swift and successful conclusion.

Association Officers and Bluebook; Getting your Association Records ready for Election Season

As we approach Election Season and your campaigns are now in full swing, we would like to remind our readers that updating your officer details with CCHQ is of fundamental importance to ensuring that the right association officers have access to what they need to fulfil their rolls.

This can be from campaigning, to membership, to finance; all association officers need the right access to VoteSource to be able to complete their rolls, and informing us of your association executive makeup allows us to note this and ensure that requests can be fulfilled as quickly and efficiently as possible. Quite simply, if we know who you are and what you do, we can support you in your roles as fully as possible, and so allow you to continue with your vital work.

With this in mind, we would ask our association officer readers to please email an up-to-date association officer list to Bluebook@conservatives.com if they haven’t already.

Updating your officer details is also key from a Data Protection point of view.

Having out of date officer details can mean that important communications such as membership transfer requests and VoteSource access requests can be sent to the wrong individuals. It also means that when it comes to managing user access on VoteSource, it is less clear who should have what level of access, and so this can cause concerns too.

All of this can be resolved by keeping your association officer details up-to-date, and so we implore you to sort this with us as soon as possible.

We look forward to receiving these details and working with all of our Association Officers this year!

VoteSource User Access

As many seats look ahead to elections in May, the VoteSource team have seen a sharp increase in the number of VoteSource access requests.

For this reason, we would just like to make our users aware that Association Chairs, and in some cases Association Agents, do have the ability to approve new VoteSource users, and amend existing VoteSource access. These individuals from within your association should, therefore, be your first port of call for any VoteSource access requests or queries.

In the first instance, VoteSource access should be managed locally, but the Member Services team are here to help if you have any difficulty making these changes. Please note, that we will need the approval of the Association Chair. before we can make any changes to access.

Your CCHQ Field Team Staff would also be able to assist with these access requests

For those tasked with managing user access in their association, please find the help guides below, which cover how to approve a new VoteSource user in your area and how to amend the access of existing users:

Approving New Users - https://votesource.uk/support/helpcenter/viewarticle/285

Managing Existing Users - https://votesource.uk/support/helpcenter/viewarticle/288

Finding Users in Your Area - https://votesource.uk/support/helpcenter/viewarticle/372

What Different Section of a User Account Mean - https://votesource.uk/support/helpcenter/viewarticle/186

List of roles a Constituency Organiser can grant - https://votesource.uk/support/helpcenter/viewarticle/151

And should you need the Member Services Team’s assistance with any access requests after speaking with your local team, please get in contact via email at memberservices@conservatives.com, or phone on 020 7984 8036 (Monday to Friday, 9am – 5pm).