PLEASE NOTE THESE DEFINITIONS:
The terms "invalid," "vacant," and "commercial" are address designations provided by the United States Postal Service. For more information on these terms please review https://postalpro.usps.com/address-quality.
"Mailing centers" are voter registration records registered at the same address as a UPS, FedEx, or USPS store. "P.O. Boxes" are voter registration records registered to P.O. Box.
Before submitting a challenge, any voter record with a non-standard address should be viewed using the geocoded address link provided beneath the address in the voter's registration record in IV3. This link will take you to the address as defined by Google Earth. Look at the location, determine if it could be someone's residence, them make your determination whether to challenge, not challenge, or skip.
When you enter the non-standard address section in IV3 you will notice you have three options: Invalid, Commercial, and Vacant. Non-standard addresses are not automatically considered ineligible, therefore they take some extra time and investigation. Before submitting a challenge based on a non-standard address, check your election code and/or call your Election Administrator to confirm.
In IV3, the non-standard addresses are not marked as residential according to USPS and are usually commercial, invalid, PO box, or vacant lot. What we recommend is that you look at the address on Google Earth.
Some addresses are zoned commercial but may be an apartment building, assisted living, or a homeless shelter which are valid to use for voter registration purposes. Use your best judgement and do a little digging to decide if any records at the address meet the criteria for a challenge.
If it is a commercial address where they can live, select "Do Not Challenge" and type your reasoning in the notes section such as "this appears to be an apartment building, community living etc,." Enter something that explains why this address can be used as a voter registration address. All records you do not challenge will remain in IV3 for other users to see. If another user views the record that was not challenged, it will come up with the note and the date that the previous user decided not to challenge the record.
If you feel the registration meets the criteria for a challenge then select "Challenge" and enter a note with any information you have collected that you feel supports your reason for challenging. For example, we have found voter registrations associated with parking lots or open parks etc. If you chose to challenge those records you can state "address is an empty lot and does not meet the criteria for a voter registration address per county or state laws." You may need to add links to state laws in the notes or information you got from your county election office.
We do not recommend challenging registrations at church addresses.
Homeless shelters and college dorms are another gray area. It is likely that some of the people registered at homeless shelters and college dorms are legally registered. If the homeless shelter has a very high number of registrations it may merit investigation. If the college dorm has registrations older than 6 years that may also merit a deeper investigation. We recommend you send these for review separately with added explanation recognizing that they may not meet the county threshold for challenge but that they should be evaluated.
Due to the sensitivity of these particular issues, we recommend you send these findings separately from any other challenges. Before you export your spreadsheet you can put in a date or date range so that only records challenged on those dates will appear on your challenge spreadsheet. In your cover letter state that you want to bring to their attention to this issue but you aren’t necessarily asking them to challenge all the registrations. You are simply encouraging them to evaluate the location. You can find the cover letter in the Submitting Challenges help desk article.