IV3 - July Newsletter

IV3 Newsletter | July 2022

This is it – the home stretch! Last week, we hit the one-month countdown to the August 5th NVRA cutoff for voter roll maintenance in most states. We have a lot of work to do in our active states in the coming weeks to get challenges submitted, and we’re going to need your help to get it done.  In today’s newsletter I’m going to cover a couple of quick updates before jumping into challenge submissions and what you can expect over the next few days and weeks. First, CAPTCHA. We have heard from many of you about the newly implemented CAPTCHA and understand your complaints. Our team decided to add a CAPTCHA in order to prevent bots and scripts from operating in IV3, and to discourage challenging records without meaningful consideration. It was our intent for the CAPTCHA to only be presented when certain behaviors were detected by the system, and our developers are working to improve sensitivity and your user experience. We apologize for any frustration this has caused but this is part of our learning experience for building a better app and program.  Help? You might have also noticed that we added a Help menu to the IV3 Home screen. There, you’ll find articles and FAQs that we have compiled based on your feedback and questions so far. Take a look if you get a chance, and never hesitate to let our team know if you have questions that are not answered in our Help resources. As we wrap up our Midterm work and close the app for development, we will be sending out a short survey to collect feedback from you on how we can improve. We want to remain focused on two main drivers as we continue to develop the IV3 app and program: user-driven features and functions, and federal, state and local law and process compliance.  The Challenge with Challenges. Laws and procedures guiding the challenge process vary not just by state, but also at the county level. This reality makes building a one-size-fits-all program impossible and instead means we are actively tailoring processes for each of our active states, and in some cases counties. When we designed IV3 our goal was for our users to complete challenges in the app and for our team to handle the rest. While we are going to explore ways to achieve that level of automation and efficiency for the future of IV3, it is very likely that in most of our states, volunteers will need to be involved in submitting their completed challenges. Our team is coordinating with volunteers in Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Texas who are working directly with local election officials to determine the most effective way for us to submit challenges in those states, while our team works with officials in Florida and Nevada. Our team is familiar with Georgia from prior work, and we are in the process of confirming that Montana has completed a significant voter roll cleanup in the time since we acquired the statewide voter file. We will be following up in the next few days with state-level guidance and instructions for submitting challenges. Anywhere our team is able to submit challenges for you, we will. Anywhere we need your help, we’ll let you know what you need to do next. Every lesson we are able to learn, every process we confirm, and every relationship we are able to develop at the state and local level will positively impact our elections and better position IV3 for success in the future. Thank You. For your dedication to election integrity and for your patience with our team as we work to build a better IV3 app and program. Keep an eye on your inbox for updates, and don’t forget to check out True the Vote on Locals for updates and LIVE events with Catherine.  Onward!Cole HughesExecutive DirectorTrue the Vote