At NationBuilder we provide voter data to our customers in the US, and people in the UK often ask us if we can do the same for them. For a number of practical and legal reasons, we can’t. However, if you are entitled to receive an electronic copy of a voter file, you can import it into your NationBuilder account yourself.
How to import voter data
NationBuilder has a separate import tool for importing voter file. This is similar to the importer you may have used to import your email list, just with a few small changes.
You have different fields available to use:
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Registered address - use this to save the addresses so you can see that they came from the electoral register
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State file ID - use this to store the voter number - see below on how to prepare that correctly first.
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Voting districts - in the UK, we have autodistricting available, so we recommend you don’t import your voter districts, and allow NationBuilder to automatically assign districts instead.
Unique ID
Unique Identifiers (UIDs) are used in NationBuilder to match people to the correct records. You will need to make a UID for your voter file before you import it. This is essential so that you can update records in the future.
One key thing you may wish to do at a later time is to update your records to add absent voter data. You will need to have a unique identifier to match on.
In the UK, voter data is supplied by your local unitary authority, borough, or district council. Each council area is broken into polling districts, which are normally identified by a two or three letter code.
Within each polling district, each voter is allocated a voter number, starting from 1. So to be able to uniquely identify a voter in a council area, you need to combine the poll district and voter number.
If you are going to import data from more than one council area, you will also need to add the council as well.
You need to import the UID for your voter in to a single field in NationBuilder. So you will need to combine the three parts into a single cell in Excel. You can do this using a formula.
Here is an example, where the poll district is in column A and the voter number is in column B. The first few cells look like this:
We can insert a column and then use a formula like this:
=”Cardiff-”&A2&”-”&B2
You can then use this as your Unique ID when you import to NationBuilder. You will need to recreate the UIDs in exactly the same way when you make any future imports, to ensure you do not create duplicates, or update the wrong records.
Autodistricting
NationBuilder will automatically assign people to the following voting districts based on their address:
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European Parliamentary Constituency
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Westminster Parliamentary Constituency
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Scottish/Welsh/London Constituency
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County Council
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County Division
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Council (borough, district or UA)
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Ward (council division)
Polling districts
We do not provide the poll district data automatically, so you may wish to import this data if you wish to be able to find everyone registered in a specific district.
The simplest way to do this is to import the poll district column as a tag list. Everyone will then have their poll district code applied to their record as a tag.
Pitfalls to avoid
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Do not use the ‘id’ field for importing your UID. This is the field for matching to NationBuilder id. If you use this, you will update incorrect records.
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UK election law requires that local councils update their voter files annually in December. When this is done, they assign new voter numbers to everyone. So if you import a second file after December, do not match with your UID, as they will not match the correct records.
