Saturday, May 28, 2016

Monitoring Email Delivery

Screenshot showing an example of reporting statistics of email delivery.
Many OpaVote elections depend on the delivery of voting emails to voters. Delivering large quantities of email is a tricky business because, as you all know, emails are unfortunately abused by spammers.

As an election manager, it is very important for you to know the status of email delivery for your election. OpaVote now makes it very easy to do this!

Above, is a portion of the management console for an election that shows email delivery status.  For this election, there are 2782 email voters.  Each email sent to a voter can be in one of four states: pending, in transit, rejected, or delivered.  We'll explain each of these.

Friday, May 27, 2016

Combining Online Votes with Paper Votes

Screenshot of form for entering ballot data.
Some of our customers have a mixed election where most voters vote online via a link in a voting email but some voters vote via a postal ballot.  When you have such an election, you need to combine the online votes with the postal votes and then count the combined votes.  In this post, we explain how you can do that with OpaVote.  We provide two options, and you can pick which works best for you.

Election then Count

OpaVote provides three types of items: (1) an Election, (2) a Poll, and (3) a Count.  With this method, you will create an OpaVote Election for your online votes, and then create an OpaVote Count to combine the online ballots with the postal ballots (you won't use a Poll).