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Source: PA Dept. of State full voter export, current as of Sept 7, 2026
Municipalities in Area 4 once sent welcome letters to newly registered Democrats. The practice faded around 2024, when the county stopped distributing the lists. This summer Ben had me rebuild the list so it pulls itself, and set up a way for Upper Providence to run a test batch. It is the most cost-effective turnout work we can do. Everything below is fully built and tested, so the only question left is which municipalities want to try it.
Send two things, once. After that a folder shows up every month with the letters, the label sheet, and the checklist.
To make the October batch, send both by September 30. Postage is Ben’s call. Want the files set up differently for your volunteers? Ask. Questions about the data or your precinct’s counts go to Dimitri, sudomoin@gmail.com.
Once a month, a script pulls the state’s voter list (the Department of State sells the full file for $20, political use only), keeps the Democrats who newly appear in the municipality, and merges each one into the municipality’s own welcome-letter template: precinct, polling place, committee people, and local contact info. The output lands in a shared Drive folder as one Word file per person, an Avery 5160 label sheet in the same order, and a work list with a checkbox per letter. The volunteer prints, labels, stamps, and ticks the box.
Upper Providence ran the first batch in August: 38 Democrats who registered after the May primary. MaryAnn Faraci, who used to run the old manual process, worked it end to end and mailed everything on September 1. Her feedback shaped the current version (one file per person, first names in the greeting, a done column).
| Municipality | New active Dems | Under 26 |
|---|
Registered May 20 through Sept 4, 2026, active status, party D. “New” here means a new registration date; it does not yet count people who moved in already registered or who switched party, which roughly quadruples the monthly number (slide 5, “Where this goes”).
It comes from the Pennsylvania Department of State’s full voter export, which anyone can buy for $20 for political use. It is more current than VoteBuilder right now. Nothing here touches VoteBuilder, and nothing individual-level is ever published or shown.
No. Send your own text and it gets merged the same way. If you don’t have one, borrow UP’s and change the name at the bottom. You keep full control of content and signature.
Good. The label sheet is optional. The files are plain Word documents, so a volunteer can add a line before printing.
The voter file is $20 a month for all of Area 4 combined. A stamp is $0.82, so a municipality mailing 10 letters a month spends about $8 in postage plus envelopes. Whether Area 4 funds postage centrally is Ben’s conversation.
Two things: your letter text (or “use UP’s”) and your committee-person list by precinct. Polling places come from the county. Email Ben or drop it in the meeting chat.
Yes. The folder, the label sheet, and the checklist are the first version, shaped by one volunteer’s feedback. If your volunteers would rather have one combined file, a different order, no labels, or something else entirely, say so. The answer is almost always yes.
Too early to say. The first 38 letters went out September 1. What we can say is that the process works and the volunteer time went from list-pulling and template-editing to print, label, stamp.