WARNING - THIS IS ONE OF MY MORE TECHNICAL POSTS. IT’S NOT FOR EVERYONE.
WHO IS THIS FOR:
Anyone currently using NCOA to look for out of state moves.
If you are a vendor sharing NCOA data with election integrity folks.
Definitions to know even if you don’t listen to this post:
NCOA = National Change of Address is a data service provided by the US Post Office that communicates mail forwarding addresses for people who OPTED IN to the US Post Office using their online services.
CASS = Coding Accuracy Support System is an open standard used by the US Post Office and other shipping vendors like UPS and FedEx that both standardize an address for more accuracy in computer recognition, AND also can confirm with the US Post office for DPV (Delivery Point Validation).
What Does The PEOPLE’S AUDIT Do Differently?
I have built an organization that now has over 25 years of experience standardizing, verifying, matching and mapping mailing addresses.
During that time, we used this experience to help Human Resource Departments manage incoming employee applications as well as work-flowed that data to the Accounting Department to then run payroll. And while in the Accounting Department, we worked with the Sales Departments to work-flow new sales to make sure invoicing had accurate customer details for billing and products delivered correctly. And while in Sales Department, we would then work with the Marketing Department to clean up their data to make sure mailing addresses were coming into the company already cleaned and verified.
In summary, we had to make sure people got their paychecks, customer got their bills and their orders all while protecting that data and navigating the laws in multiple states.
Our primary market was taking small businesses and turning them into medium size businesses that would typically then get acquired by larger firms. So we built up a tool box of processes that would repeatedly and consistently transform these small organization into valuable investments for our investor partners.
I only say all that above to make sure it’s clear that I personally eat, breath and sleep, process improvement and specifically, data cleaning ALWAYS PROVES TO MAKE THINGS SMOOTHER AND FASTER.
That said, I knew enough around the NCOA to be careful when using it and to NEVER presented that information to our general users as well and sending that information to the election officials. Where people are moving to IS NOT PUBLIC DATA. The voter rolls are PUBLIC DATA (thanks to that recent federal ruling in South Carolina).
We as a community have to be more careful in handling move data or the election integrity groups will be loose access to this important analytics tool.
The People’s Audit has been committed to protecting our user’s CREDIBILITY because without it, you have no chance of influencing any change in your county or state.
So we have consistently educated our users and focused on the CASS Verification of Addresses in The People’s Audit. We did use NCOA to do spot checks on states and only published counts of voters showing permanent forwarding to addresses out of state to bring awareness to the size of the problem.
And mostly to show how ineffective ERIC was at doing what it advertised it was doing….it sure wasn’t cleaning our voter rolls.
If you like deeper dives into this kind of technical topics, please like this post. I typically use Substack to talk about general election integrity topics, but I can do more posts that go deeper into technical topics if enough of the audience wants to hear it.
The USPS Is Clamping Down on Access to NCOA