By allocating an address, the Electoral Enrolment Centre is allocating voter rights so it is absolutely essential they have the correct address for every voter in New Zealand.
That was one of the key reasons that in November 2006, the Centre became one of the first major New Zealand mailers to adopt address data from New Zealand Post’s Postal Address File (PAF).
The Electoral Enrolment Centre maintains electoral rolls and conducts the Maori Electoral Option. As well as maintaining the electoral rolls on a daily basis and encouraging eligible electors to enrol, the centre runs enrolment update campaigns prior to all major electoral events.
Information Systems Manager, Bob Chandler explains that using the PAF as the basis for address data has helped them be more certain voters are receiving critical enrolment and voting information.
“We moved to a new Electoral Enrolment computer system in 2003. Because we work closely with New Zealand Post, we built the new system to ensure the database would hold all the necessary address fields under Post’s new address standards.”
With a sound database in place, the Centre began the process of matching their database to the PAF one.
“For most of the urban areas the matching was straightforward. Once we had established that a particular street and suburb in our database was the same address as the one in the PAF database we could apply the updated postcode.
“The rural addresses though were much harder – there are a lot of Main Streets for example and unnumbered properties are even harder still. In many cases the Registrars around the country have had to manually look up rural addresses and in fact that’s a process that is still continuing today,” says Bob.
While many organisations use data solution companies to help them with their cleansing, matching and updating processes, few companies existed when the Electoral Enrolment Centre began using the PAF.
“Our software provider, Catalyst IT, wrote their own programmes to do this for us,” says Bob. “We’re really pleased they’ve now extended this service to other clients and that their PureData service is SendRight™ certified so we can get our Statement of Accuracy through them too.”
During update campaigns the Electoral Enrolment Centre posts 2.9 million mail packs. Having accurate address data means they will continue to qualify for bulk mail discounts after 1 July 2008 and that adds up to a hefty saving for the organisation.
It also gives other users of the data confidence in its accuracy.
“We supply our address data to local authorities for them to run their by-elections, polls and surveys. We also provide the data for jury summons and in election year in particular we get numerous requests from candidates and political parties who also use the data for mail-outs.
The Centre runs a quarterly update of PAF data as each new release is made. Their own sophisticated address updating systems also mean they keep an accurate record of where voters live.
With an election year now upon them, the Electoral Enrolment Centre is confident the major mailings they’ll have to do this year will be as accurate as they can be.
“We currently have a 99.6% postcode match against the PAF and our latest numbers show our Statement of Accuracy will be well over the benchmark figure set by New Zealand Post.”
FOOTNOTE
New Zealand Post is aware of the complexity of identifying un-numbered rural addresses and has granted an exemption for these from SOA requirements until June 2009. New Zealand Post is also working with SendRight™ certified software suppliers who have been given access to opt-in rural addresses to enable better matching of rural addresses.
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