November VoteSource Newsletter
Nov 2024 · 3135 words · 15 minute read
Welcome to the November edition of the VoteSource Newsletter.
Missed our last edition? Catch up by clicking here.
Or click here to browse all previous editions.
VoteSource Maintenance – We are planning to take VoteSource offline in January for crucial background maintenance work.
More details are to follow on this announcement, including confirmed dates, but we are planning to take VoteSource offline for one Week in January for critical background maintenance to take place.
This will mean that VoteSource cannot be accessed in anyway, including the mobile canvassing app.
Stay tuned for more information in December’s newsletter or via other channels of communication.
Annual Rollover
Information previously sent out via VoteSource Newsletter on 25/10/24 - this news article includes updated delaying local authorities.
We will start to receive files for the Annual Electoral Register Rollover from December 1st. This reflects the annual canvass of electors carried out in the Autumn every year. In addition to adding and deleting electors, it reorders the Electoral Roll number of constituents.
Please note that not all Local Authorities provide their annual rollover files promptly on the 1st of December. We do chase stragglers, but this can delay your rollover locally.
We are also aware that due to the timing of the General Election some local authorities are delaying publication until 2025.
The following local authorities have contacted us to say the will not be supplying until 2025, we have tried to supply as much detail as possible from them:
- Broadland District Council - 31st Jan 2025
- North Somerset Council - 1st Feb 2025
- Warwick District Council - 1st Feb 2025
- Preston City Council - 1st Feb 2025
- South Ribble Borough Council - 1st Feb 2025
- London Borough of Lambeth - 1st Feb 2025
- Dartford Borough Council - 1st Feb 2025
- Wrexham County Borough Council - 1st Feb 2025
- Newcastle upon Tyne City Council - 1st Feb 2025
- Oxford City Council - 3rd Feb 2025
- Wealden District Council - 1st Feb 2025
- Stroud District Council - 2nd Jan 2025
- Great Yarmouth Borough Council - 7th jan 2025
- Birmingham City Council - 1st Feb 2025
- Torbay Council - 2nd Jan 2025
- Newport City Council - 3rd Feb 2025
- Isle of Wight Council - 2nd Jan 2025
- Welwyn Hatfield Borough Council - 3rd Feb 2025
- Tameside Metropolitan Borough Council - Jan/Feb 2025
- Rhondda Cynon Taf County Borough Council - 1st Feb 2025
- London Borough of Islington - 1st Feb 2025
- South Derbyshire District Council - 3rd Feb 2025
- North Devon District Council - 2nd Jan 2025
- West Suffolk Council - 2nd Feb 2025
- Coventry City Council - 1st Feb 2025
- East Suffolk Council - 3rd Feb 2025
- Fenland District Council - 1st Feb 2025
- London Borough of Waltham Forest - 1st Feb 2025
- Royal Borough of Kingston upon Thames - 1st Feb 2025
- Runnymede Borough Council - 1st Feb 2025
- Waverley Borough Council - 1st Feb 2025
- Breckland District Council - 1st Feb 2025
- Reigate and Banstead Borough Council - 1st Feb 2025
- South Tyneside Council - 1st Feb 2025
- Bury Metropolitan Borough Council - 1st Feb 2025
- London Borough of Camden - 3rd Feb 2025
- Plymouth City Council - 1st Feb 2025
- Cheltenham Borough Council - 14th Jan 2025
- Lanarkshire Valuation Joint Board - 1st Feb 2025
- Glasgow City Council - 1st Feb 2025
- Flintshire County Council - 1st Feb 2025
- Surrey Heath Borough Council - 1st Feb 2025
- Cotswold District Council - 1st Feb 2025
- Rotherham Metropolitan Borough Council - 1st Feb 2025
- Cherwell District Council - 1st Feb 2025
- Wigan Metropolitan Borough Council - 3rd Feb 2025
- London Borough of Wandsworth - 1st Feb 2025
- Wokingham Borough Council - 1st Feb 2025
- Kirklees Council - 1st Feb 2025
- Oadby and Wigston Borough Council - 1st Feb 2025
- St Albans District Council - 1st Feb 2025
- West Devon Borough Council - 3rd Feb 2025
- Arun District Council - 1st Feb 2025
- West Oxfordshire District Council - 1st Feb 2025
- Solihull Metropolitan Borough Council - 1st Feb 2025
- Neath Port Talbot County Borough Council - 1st Feb 2025
- Southampton City Council - 1st Feb 2025
- Highland and Western Isles Valuation Joint Board - 1st Feb 2025
- Tewkesbury Borough Council - 1st Feb 2025
- Durham County Council - 6th Jan 2025
- Southwark Council - 1st Feb 2025
- Guildford Borough Council - 10th Jan 2025
- Blaenau Gwent County Borough Council - 1st Feb 2025
- Derby City Council - 1st Feb 2025
- Gosport Borough Council - 1st Feb 2025
- Chorley Borough Council - 1st Feb 2025
- Knowsley Metropolitan Borough Council - 1st Feb 2025
- Harlow District Council - 7th jan 2025
- Westmorland and Furness Council - 1st Feb 2025
- Hertsmere Borough Council - 1st Feb 2025
- Amber Valley Borough Council - 1st Feb 2025
- Malvern Hills District Council - 1st Feb 2025
- Colchester Borough Council - 1st Feb 2025
- South Hams District Council - 3rd Feb 2025
- Southend-on-Sea Borough Council - 1st Feb 2025
- Portsmouth City Council - 1st Feb 2025
- Stockport Metropolitan Borough Council - 1st Feb 2025
- Herefordshire Council - 3rd Feb 2025
- London Borough of Newham - 3rd Feb 2025
- London Borough of Sutton - 1st Feb 2025
- Tunbridge Wells Borough Council - 2nd Jan 2025
- Barnsley Metropolitan Borough Council - 1st Feb 2025
- Canterbury City Council - 1st Feb 2025
- Rochdale Metropolitan Borough Council - 1st Feb 2025
- Leicester City Council - 3rd Feb 2025
- Stevenage Borough Council - 1st Feb 2025
- Telford and Wrekin Council - 1st Feb 2025
- West Northamptonshire Council - 1st Feb 2025
- Elmbridge Borough Council - 1st Feb 2025
- Gloucester City Council - 1st Feb 2025
- Sandwell Metropolitan Borough Council - 1st Feb 2025
- London Borough of Bexley - 3rd Feb 2025
- Tandridge District Council - 3rd January 2025
- Bournemouth,Christchurch and Poole Council - 3rd Feb 2025
- London Borough of Redbridge - 1st Feb 2025
- Castle Point Borough Council - 2nd Jan 2025
- South Kesteven District Council - 2nd Jan 2025
What should you be aware of before rollover?
Walk Routes
Walk routes are linked to the current polling districts. When we receive rollover files new polling districts are created. We do our best to keep walk routes where possible, but we usually cannot save everything due to these changes.
In the past we have tried to assist users who have lost many walk routes by providing breakdowns of which streets were assigned to which walk route.
This will no longer be possible due to staffing numbers, but you can extract such lists from VoteSource yourself provided you have the right level of access.
We would strongly recommend that you plan ahead and manually generate an excel spreadsheet for each polling district before December 1st.
Instructions on how to do this are as follows:
- Click on the Campaigns tile.
- Scroll down the next page and click on the Walk Routes tile.
- Select your electoral geography type and corresponding electoral area, e.g. Parliamentary and South Dorset.
- Select a polling district, e.g. CHC1
- If walk routes have been created you can click the Export to Spreadsheet option for the polling district, found on the right hand side of the page just under the map.
This process would need to be repeated for each polling district but would provide you with a guide to quickly recreate existing walk routes post rollover.
Target Audiences in VoteSource
Following annual rollover not only will roll numbers be updated, and changes made to polling districts be applied. You will also have new additions to your electoral register added.
Target audiences are snapshots of the register when they are run. They are not updated by registers being uploaded or changes to electoral geography.
As such, whilst certain activities such as canvass or survey data entry via the VoteSource website can continue post rollover, we do strongly recommend archiving older target audiences and running new ones.
Activities such as mobile canvassing will not be possible to continue on target audiences created before rollover. This is due to changing roll numbers and polling district changes.
In simple terms, you are not able to access mobile canvassing sessions set up before rollover once it has taken place.
We therefore highly recommend running new target audiences for campaign activities as soon as your annual rollover has taken place – and archiving older audiences so there is no confusion about which ones should be used to enter data by campaigners.
Not only will you have the new roll numbers in these new sessions, but you will also ensure that any new additions to the register are included for your campaigning.
Once your Annual Register has been loaded into VoteSource – On or after December 1st 2024.
You can check the status of your rollover within VoteSource. If you click into the Register tile and then click on the next Register tile, the system will display the loaded registers currently available. This is also where you can check if your monthly updates have been applied, but you will be looking for Annual Register in the left-hand column for this year’s rollover. Remember - until Annual Register appears with a date effective of 2024 and with Loaded in the far-right status column, your annual rollover has not been applied.
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Please check your register and report any concerns to the Support team, providing examples.
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Improve the matching of records by using the manual match process in the Drop Off section and the merge ability.
Every effort is made to ensure that all records are matched together successfully via our automated process, however, inevitably there will be some the process cannot automatically match.
This could be because the individuals have moved address, or provided data to the local authority which does not match what is stored on VoteSource, like a date of birth. In some cases, it can even be where parents share the same first name as their children. With examples like these we need your local knowledge to merge these records back together.
We strongly recommend that when you come to match your records together you go to the Drop Off section of VoteSource, found by clicking on the Register tile, select your publishing authority and the criteria you wish to search for, I.E. Voting Intention of Conservative and then export the responses to a spreadsheet and download the spreadsheet to excel. You will then have a hard copy to work on merging records after the first monthly update of 2024.
You can then look up each record via Constituent search and merge the record if they are still at the same address using the Merge ability.
The advantage of using this method is that you can merge records at any time – there is no time constraint like with Drop Offs. Also by using the Merge ability it greatly reduces the chance of records splitting in the future.
Instructions on how to merge records can be found in the Help Centre:
“How to merge a constituent record that’s not matched to an electoral record to a constituent record” https://votesource.uk/support/HelpCenter/ViewArticle/331
“Drop off – How to extract a list of Drop Offs to merge post annual rollover” https://votesource.uk/support/HelpCenter/ViewArticle/337
If you would rather use the Drop Off section – which will provide you with possible matches for the dropped off record, please follow the instructions below. (Please be aware that the drop off procedure is time sensitive, once your first monthly update of the new year has been applied you should no longer continue matching drop off records. You can of course then start using the merge ability at that time.)
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To find the drop off section from the VoteSource homepage click on the Register tile and then Drop Off.
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You can then select the Publishing Authority and the Published Register you wish to match to.
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You will be able to select constituents who have “dropped off the register” based on a number of criteria – e.g. Membership, has a specific Voting Intention etc.
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The system will allow you to manually match these records to potential records in the system.
The following user guide can be found in the Help Centre on VoteSource to assist with Drop Offs:
“Drop Off – Annual Roll Over” https://votesource.uk/support/HelpCenter/ViewArticle/336
Once your first monthly update has been applied post your annual rollover you can no longer use drop off for the previous year.
Once the first monthly update has been applied, you should only use the drop off section to match records that have split during the monthly update.
You will only be able to use drop offs for each monthly update until next year’s annual rollover. However, you can continue to us the merge feature, found in constituent records, at any time regardless of monthly update files or annual rollover.
If you have any questions, please contact the Support team on 020 7984 8000 or helpdesk@conservatives.com
VoteSource Canvasser App and the Apple iOS 18 update
We are aware that some users are having issues with the latest release from Apple of iOS 18.
We have had reports of campaigners not being able to access tasks, take part in poll day activities or not even get past the login section.
We understand that Apple have further updates in the pipeline to address compatibility issues for a range of Apps, not just the VoteSource Canvasser app.
We are monitoring the situation and will continue to provide further communication as more information becomes available. iOS 18 is a new feature release rather than a security update. If you have not yet opted in to iOS 18 and wish to use the VoteSource Canvasser app you may want to hold off from opting in.
Importing Your Marked Registers for You
We appreciate that many of the digital files you request do not arrive in the format we require. But simply forwarding them as they are to our team will not resolve that for you. If you do not submit your files in the format requested in this article, we will return them to you and ask you to adjust them. If you continue to not supply them as requested you will be required to enter them manually.
We’re sure you’re all aware how important entering the marked register is - lots of people have already bought theirs from the General Election.
Knowing who voted and who didn’t is valuable information - especially in an election with a lower turnout than usual.
More and more local authorities are providing digital copies of marked registers in an excel XLSX or CSV format (files that can be opened in excel), and if yours is we can assist with getting that data loaded into the system.
We cannot assist with paper copies or PDF files though and these will need to be entered in the usual manual way on VoteSource.
If you have not entered marked registers manually before, guidance can be found here:
Marked Register Data Entry https://votesource.uk/support/HelpCenter/ViewArticle/283
If are able to provide us your digital marked register files, in excel XLSX or CSV format, they will need to be sent to our Helpdesk team (helpdesk@conservatives.com). Please make sure that your correspondence with the Helpdesk team is clear in its content, as well as ensuring that the file (and its title) you submit to them is likewise clear and correct. For reference file titles should always begin with the Council name that the marked register is for; a good format would be: Council Name - Vote Type - Election - Marked Register. The title of the file must at least contain the Council Name for us to be able to process it properly.
As for the format of these files, they will need to be in an Excel format and each council area will need to be in 1 file rather than as separate wards. Please do not send us files that are for your association/constituency areas; they will need to be for council areas to be processed.
As for the fields we require in this file, they are as follows:
- Election Date – For every row
- Elector Number – Must be in the format Postal District Code – Electoral Roll Number e.g., ABCD-1234. We will accept if the postal district code and roll number are two separate columns but this must be consistent throughout the file.
- Voted – Should be Y or N
- Postal Vote – Should be Y or N (Please ensure every file includes this column even if every value is Y or N)
If your file has extra columns, please ensure that the copy you send to the Helpdesk team does not contain them. By this we mean we do not require columns containing names, addresses, etc.
Finally, you will also need to make sure that all roll numbers are in a 1234/1 format so that they can be correctly processed.
We appreciate that the local authorities might not provide your register in the format we request. Unfortunately, if it is not in the format we have specified we are unable to adapt it or process it for you. If files are not supplied in the requested format we will have to return them and ask you to edit them so we can run the process or you can choose to enter them manually if you so wish.
Further to this, supplying multiple files (to include additions, corrections, etc.) will cause delays, so please make sure to submit only the complete file that is ready to upload.
If you have any other queries please contact helpdesk@conservatives.com
Insight
Many of you will be familiar with the Insight Team’s quick tile audiences created for specific elections. They have now produced four new ones for the local elections in 2025 to help kick start your campaigning.
These can be found from the VoteSource homepage by going to Campaigns -> Target Audiences -> New Target Audience + -> Scroll to the bottom of the page
All four audiences begin with NEW! and will identify the following electors:
Turnout1 – Likely Conservatives who we should encourage to vote. For this election the two Turnout audiences contain all likely Conservatives – even those already quite likely to vote.
Turnout2 – Likely Conservatives who did not vote in the General Election according to marked register that has been entered.
Con-Reform – Voters we think were choosing between ourselves and the Reform Party at the General Election. In places where Reform has a candidate, we’ll have to persuade these voters, in other areas they might be more like turnout voters.
Persuasion – Contains a lot of voters who voted Conservative in GE19 but moved to Labour or Liberal Democrat in July 2024 – voters we may be able to win back in May 2025.
If you have any queries on how to run or set up these new target voter tiles, please contact helpdesk@conservatives.com
If you have questions about who the audiences are identifying please contact insight@conseravtives.com