DCRP PRECINCT CHAIR UPDATE:

A New Sample Ballot Feature Added to Each of Your Precinct Profiles

New Website Feature Added

One of the best constituent-service tools that Precinct Chairs can use is a customized Sample Ballot made specifically for your precinct.

Now that the Dallas County Elections Department (as of Saturday) has released sample ballots for the November 8th General Election, I have added a feature that makes it easy and convenient for both you and members of the public to download the specific Sample Ballot for your specific precinct.

As you all know, I have previously made a Precinct Profile page for every precinct in Dallas County; all 827 of them! For precincts with a sitting DCRP Precinct Chair, I have added the Sample Ballot features as a smart button that will download your unique Sample Ballot. The smart button is now a part of your Precinct Profile page and will carry over from election to election with each new Sample Ballot produced in the future.

Please note that these ballots are NOT the generic county-wide Sample Ballot but the specific customized ballot made for your specific precinct.

The Dallas County Elections Department indexes each geography-specific ballot with a unique token for the PDF file of the ballot stored on DCED’s election information supplier, Clarity Elections, and its AWS cloud storage. To implement the feature, I made special programming that I incorporated into a smart button that will download the specific PDF files of the custom Sample Ballot for your precinct. I have looked up every token for every precinct with a sitting Republican Precinct Chair and placed the token into a database that drives the Precinct Profile pages and all of its smart buttons.. The smart button will allow you and/or the public to download the specific Sample Ballot for your precinct by merely clicking the button; no further input is required.

Please note that these PDF files are not facsimiles or approximations of the Dallas-County-supplied Sample Ballots. Instead, they ARE(!) the same files coming directly from the same Clarity Elections server cloud used by the Dallas County Elections Department.

The advantage of this approach is that you AND YOUR CONSTITUENTS can download the sample ballot for your precinct without going through the DCED website and its requirement for using a VUID or a birth date to download the file. This means the customized sample ballot if just a click away without additional input.

Not only can you get the sample ballot, but the public will be able to see the rest of our Republican messaging contained in our website, particularly our candidate information.

You can download the PDF of your sample ballot and include it in your electronic communications sent to your constituent or, alternatively, include the URL link to your Precinct Profile page to directly connect with your constituents. Also, the Precinct Profile page features the use of our “Dialog” feature that will allow your constituents to safely contact you even if they do not know you personally yet.

You may access the feature in the public facet of website. Be sure to share the link of your Precinct Profile page with your constituents. You can see the list view of precincts at the first red button shown below. Simply scan through the list or use the search feature to find your Precinct Profile details.

Also, you can access the feature in the private Precinct Chair List in the Precinct Chair Portal at the second red button shown below.

I recommend that you check the specific sample ballot for your specific precinct as soon as possible. We are highly confident that the ballot is faithful to what the Dallas County Elections Department shows for your precinct. That is not to say that the DCED data is 100% correct; there could be errors in one or more precincts. This year’s Sample Ballots are brand new on the Clarity Elections’ server cloud and, conceivably, there could be some undetected errors in the ballots' construction. We have every reason to believe that the DCED and Clarity Elections’ data are correct. However, always counseling vigilance, it is a good idea to double check your Sample Ballot as a safety precaution.

If you find an error, please let me know and I will immediately endeavor to get it run to ground and fixed.