Search by jurisdiction: county in the upper right corner above page no.
Soft matching: yes
Signing dates: no sandwiching allowed, year not required
Transcribing: allowed
On Missouri ballot initiatives, there are 5 places where a county is written. Just above the signature lines is the county where the circulator and notary happen to be in when they sign the circulator affidavit. That county, written next to the circulator's name, can be anywhere in Missouri and does not need to match the others. The other 4 places are where the signers are registered to vote, and those counties must all match. If any do not match, flag the file as a bad scan with code m
instead of doing any work. Check here daily, especially as we near May 3, because this requirement could change as time for the campaign to fix stuff runs out. The second and third instance of the county are not legally required, and you are only flagging to prevent confusion when they sort the petitions for official submission.
I am seeing lots of saved declarations with missing or mismatched counties. The counties in the declaration shorthand is a backup in case you missed this when first looking at the file. Deficient circulator declarations get returned to the circulators to fix, but missing or mismatched counties can be fixed by the campaign's office staff, so flagging the scan is more appropriate. It is especially important to flag the scan if there are mismatched counties that start with the same letter, such as St Louis and St Charles. If there is a county problem, flag rather than record the declaration. I know you don't get paid for flagging scans, but this is the right way to handle it, and you'll still make plenty of money.
St Louis City and St Louis are not the same county. St Louis City is treated as a distinct county from plain St Louis.
Repeating, always validate against the county in the upper right corner regardless of anything else. This is the final backup in case the first two county checks (flagging and shorthand) fail to detect a wrong county somewhere.
In each spot in the shorthand where you enter the first letter of the county, enter c
for St Louis City to distinguish it from St Louis County.
The shorthand is the
Check first the box only if the circulator ticked that they are paid, and select the payer from the dropdown. If the payer is written on the petition but not listed in Sigtrack, edit the list and insert the new payer in alphabetic order. Ignore LLC or Inc for the payer name, and don't use any punctuation. Leave a blank option at the top and only remove duplicate entries in case two or more of you edited the list at the same time. If you get a message the list is being edited, click outside the field and try again. Someone else may have added the payer right before you. Do not fret if there are similarly spelled payers. The payer selection is forgiving as long as it's close and will not result in an error over spelling differences. If the payer is clearly not a person or organization (e.g., St Charles), leave the payer blank.
Check the second box only if the circulator signed (left side).
From the right side, enter the notary signing date and check the third box only if the notary signed and the fourth box only if the notary stamped their seal. Ignore notary address; it is not required.
Missing both city and zip is a fixable deficiency (only one or the other is required, like the default specs). When both are missing, search for the voter anyway and if found, tag -c#. If not found, tag 0 with no -c.
You will at times see -d#. This is automatically generated by Sigtrack when the date is missing on a line, since that is also fixable in Missouri. It is recorded based on what you enter for the date. Don't manually enter -d. Leave it alone and record signing dates like normal.
A P.O. Box will count as non-deficient if the voter is listed with a P.O. Box in the voter file. There are a very small number of those.