Data on when ballots have been returned and who has returned them is recorded in VAN. We will update this information every morning by 10 AM using the information from the previous day given to us by the Secretary of State. If you are not seeing recent information, it is likely that it has not yet been processed by the Secretary of State's office.
To find this information in VAN, begin in "Create a List." From there, you will find a drop-down field called "Absentee Voting." In this field, you will notice several fields of information for you to pull from for each ongoing election.
Here, you are able to exclude people who have already voted or find those who have had their ballots accepted and processed. Note that we do not have access to those who have had their ballots rejected.
To find those who have voted early, you can go to the "Returned the Ballot" field under "Early Voter Status" and click the "Anyone who Returned the Ballot" checkbox.
To filter out early voters, you can simply click "Exclude People Who Have Absentee Voted." You could also add a step, exclude people, and choose "Anyone who Returned the Ballot."
This information is useful for campaigns to utilize, as it may not be the best use of resources to chase after people who have already voted. A potential use case of this information would be to build a saved master list of the people you would like to phonebank to get out the vote, then exclude people who have already voted. This would mean that your list would be refreshed with people who have already voted each time you send the phonebank to a new round.
You can also view information on which individuals have voted and when. To do so, click on their name from you generated list or "Quick Look Up", find the absentee voting drop down, and review their data. You can then see if and when a person returned their ballot.
This information will also be tagged automatically in MiniVAN. Under a person's name, you will see a "Voted" tag to indicated that they have already voted.
If every voter in a household has voted, you will see the voted tag next to the household.
As always, if you have any questions about this process or if you have any VAN support questions, please email us at voterfile@dfl.org.