Coffee, Chocolate, and Voter Confidence: Equal Exchange Leverages OpaVote to Strengthen Workplace Democracy

Executive Summary

Equal Exchange suffered a contentious and problematic election. As a worker-owned cooperative, it was critical that their members understood the election process and could easily participate. By switching to OpaVote, they eliminated technical difficulties, assessed alternative voting methods, and created complete transparency and ease-of-use for their members. 

Background

Equal Exchange is a worker-owned cooperative that embraces democratic business practices. With approximately 100 worker-owners, the cooperative distributes organic, Fair Trade products such as coffee, tea, cocoa, and chocolate. These goods are sourced from small farmer cooperatives in Latin America, Africa, and Asia. Founded in 1986, Equal Exchange is the oldest and largest Fair Trade coffee company in the United States.

Sharyn McWilliams, the Worker-Owner Coordinator, facilitates the annual meetings where worker-owners vote on various positions and proposals. She shared their challenges with us.

The Challenge: Previous Election Unclear and Confusing

In a previous election, Equal Exchange used another popular voting platform to elect board members. Unfortunately, they did not have the means to explain the voting method of choice, leaving many participants confused about how the votes were counted and how the results were determined.

Equal Exchange was at risk of having to hold a re-election. In response, the cooperative formed an eight-person working group tasked with researching how to improve the voting process, specifically focusing on better educating worker-owners and improving the presentation of results. That’s when they discovered OpaVote.

Why OpaVote?

Comprehensive Knowledge Base

McWilliams and the team benefitted from OpaVote’s vast, accessible educational resources. The platform provided clear, detailed explanations of various voting methods (such as instant runoff voting, single transferable vote, and approval voting), and recommended the best methods for different kinds of elections (for example electing a group vs. electing a single person) in a straightforward, non-technical manner. This was key in helping Equal Exchange make an informed decision about how to structure their voting process.

Reliable and Easy-to-Use

The previous voting platform had failed during a member meeting. OpaVote’s straightforward set-up stood out when the team was able to switch to it on the spot in just 10 minutes. 

Recount Feature

OpaVote’s recount tool was invaluable. The team ran recounts with different parameters to see how the results aligned with their expectations. McWilliams and the working group appreciated the ability to test different methods, showing exactly how votes would be calculated. OpaVote’s visual representation of vote outcomes, including clear, color-coded breakdowns, helped explain the results in a way that was easy to understand.

Cost-Effective

OpaVote proved to be both affordable and efficient, offering a cost-effective solution that met Equal Exchange’s needs without exceeding their budget.

Results

Thanks to OpaVote, Equal Exchange avoided a re-vote and, more importantly, ensured that the worker-owners felt confident in the voting method chosen as well as the voting process.

The platform played a pivotal role in helping the cooperative clearly communicate the voting method and results.

The experience led to a significant change in their election process:

• Voting Process Codification: Equal Exchange specified their voting process in their official bylaws.

• Educational Commitment: McWilliams, the Worker-Owner Coordinator, now educates the worker-owners on the voting methods prior to each annual meeting, ensuring everyone understands the process in advance.

OpaVote was instrumental in transforming Equal Exchange’s approach to elections, making the voting process transparent, efficient, and trusted by all worker-owners.

OpaVote’s 2024 HECVAT Lite Assessment Now Available

OpaVote is trusted by many higher-education institutions to run elections and polls -- from board, senate, and committee elections to approval of resolutions and rules changes.

As part of our commitment to secure and reliable online voting, and our dedication to making choosing OpaVote as streamlined as possible for institutional IT departments, we're thrilled to announce that OpaVote has completed its first HECVAT Lite assessment.

The HECVAT Lite assessment is a security assessment toolkit designed for colleges and universities, and is applicable beyond just education.

Security is paramount in voting systems, and a HECVAT Lite assessment from your online voting provider demonstrates how they’ve taken steps to preserve the integrity of democratic elections on their platform.

Election managers can request OpaVote’s HECVAT Lite documentation to verify the cybersecurity controls, policies, and procedures we have in place to protect sensitive institutional and constituent information.

To request our 2024 HECVAT Lite documentation, contact us at team@opavote.com.

OpaVote is Under New Management

OpaVote has been trusted by organizations around the world for easy, reliable and affordable voting for decades. In late 2023, OpaVote’s founder, Jeff, began looking for someone to take over operations. Cohere, a small democratic software worker-cooperative, heard about Jeff’s search through CalRCV and reached out. We got on a call together, and everything clicked. As of January 1st, 2024 Cohere has taken full responsibility for OpaVote’s continued operations.

OpaVote has earned a reputation for its robust security and versatility in supporting various election types. Cohere plans to build on the platform's strengths and improve its accessibility and usability to ease the adoption of democratic decision-making in organizations large and small.

Already, we have completed a HECVAT Lite security risk and compliance assessment and integrated OpaVote support and assistance into our workflows.

We’d love to hear from you about how we can best support you in nurturing democratic practices at your organizations and in your community. Please share your thoughts and suggestions to team@opavote.com. We intend to make this transition as smooth as possible for you, and your insights will play a crucial role in shaping the future of OpaVote.

We look forward to embarking on this exciting journey together!

Best regards from all of us at Cohere
Ana, Betsy, Damien, Jennifer, Mae and Zee

Running Elections through Zoom

With the current unfortunate situation, most in-person meetings need to be cancelled. Organizations are still meeting up, but using services like Zoom to conduct their meetings.

Where you previously held elections at an in-person meeting, you now need to figure out how to conduct your elections during a Zoom meeting (or Hangouts, Slack, Skype, etc.).

In this blog post, we explain how you can easily run an online election through Zoom. Even better, you can easily run many elections during a single Zoom meeting.

Three Most Common Voter Requests and How to Deal with Them

For an election manager, running an online election, especially one with a lot of voters, can be a lot of work! In this blog post, we address the three most common voter requests, and how to handle them with OpaVote.

Voter did not receive a voting email

A voter contacts you and says they didn't receive a voter email. In many (I suspect most) instances, the voter did receive the email but can't find it or accidentally deleted it. For example, voter emails to gmail, Yahoo, and the like should always be delivered.

Regardless, the best thing to do is to send them another voting email! This is easy to do from the management console:

• click the link that looks like this: 100 email voters,
• on the following page, click the email address of the voter, and then
• click the "Send Reminder" button.

You can do this as many times as you need to.

If the voter still hasn't received the voting email, then you have two more options. First, disable the voter's email address from the same page that you used to send a reminder email. Then, you can do one of the following:

• get another email address from the voter and add it to the election, or
• create a code voter (see here) and send the secret code to the voter along with the code voting link (looks like this: https://www.opavote.com/en/code/...).

In some instances, it is possible that none of your voters received the voting email! This can happen

where all of your voters have an email with the same organization (e.g., a school or a company), and the organization has blocked emails from OpaVote. Because OpaVote sends many voting emails to the organization in a short period of time, the voting emails may be classified as spam and blocked.

When this happens, the best thing to do is to contact your IT department and ask them to whitelist emails from opavote.com. Your IT department may ask you to provide further information (such as our IP addresses). If this happens, just contact us, and we will provide whatever information is needed.

OpaVote says voter has voted but voter says otherwise

Each voting link can be used to vote only once. The voting link can be clicked on as many times as a voter likes, but once a vote has been cast with the voting link, OpaVote will respond with a message that the voter has already voted.

Sometimes a voter will get this message and insist that they haven't yet voting. There are two possible reasons for this: (i) the voter actually voted and forgot, or (ii) the voter forwarded their voting email to someone else and someone else voted with the voting link.

When this happens, you have two options:

• Tell the voter "sorry" but they cannot vote since the voting link has been used.
• Send another voting link to the voter (e.g., get another email address or create a code voter) to allow the voter to vote. Note that for anonymous elections (i.e., most elections) you cannot remove the vote from the voter's original voting link.

OpaVote voting page is not working

OpaVote voting pages work on any device (e.g., phones, tablets, computers, etc.) and any commonly used browser. OpaVote has large numbers of voters casting votes every day, and our voting pages work fine for just about all of them!

Occasionally, a voter will complain that the voting page is not working for them. E.g., something on the page is cut off or the "Vote" button doesn't work. This is caused by some unusual or buggy software that the voter has installed. We can't help diagnose such problems, but there are few easy things the voter can do:

• vote from a different device (e.g., computer instead of phone),
• vote with a different browser (e.g., Chrome instead of Safari),
• vote using an incognito mode of the browser, or
• disable all browser extensions before voting.

We hope you find this information helpful, and we wish you successful elections!

Duration of elections and polls now resets when you start voting

For our online elections and polls, we have an election duration that indicates how long your election is available on the OpaVote website. On our management console, we present an expiration date so that you know exactly when your election is no longer available.

We've never been completely happy with how we have implemented these durations, and we are tweaking it a bit to hopefully make it better and less confusing for our customers. Here is a table that summarizes the changes:

	Before	Now
Free Duration	2	1
Paid Duration	12	10
Change on Voting Start	None	Duration resets to start of election or poll

We'll explain this in more detail. Free duration is for people who have never made a payment to OpaVote, and paid duration is for people who have made at least one payment. By making a single payment of $10, all of your elections qualify for paid duration. Further, the $10 you paid can be applied to increase the limits on an election. Pretty good deal for $10.

The key change is that durations now reset when you start voting.

Before, your election would last 12 weeks, but if you started voting 11 weeks after creating your election, you would only have 1 week left. Some of our customers found this confusing and frustrating.

Now, your election can last 10 weeks, but if you start voting after 9 weeks, you now have 10 more weeks to finish your election!

Although we've slightly decreased the durations, we hope that resetting the duration when you start voting more than makes up for it.

If you need your election duration to last longer than what we've described above, then the next step is to extend your election by a year, and we charge another $50 for this per election. For now, if you need this extra duration, send us an email and we'll take care of it. In the near future, we'll have buttons on the management console to allow you to do this your self.

These changes are not retroactive so any elections that existed before today won't have their durations change. One exception is that if you created an election before today and now start voting, then your election will be under the new duration rules after you start voting (10 weeks from voting start). The expiration date on the console will always be accurate. If this causes a problem for you, let us know and we'll fix it.

All of the above applies to both our Elections and Polls. Since Counts don't have a voting stage, the duration will be based on the creation of the Count and won't ever reset.

We hope you like this change, and please feel free to provide us feedback on this change or about any other aspects of our services.

Why we don't support equal rankings in RCV elections

OpaVote specializes in online elections with ranked-choice voting. With ranked-choice voting, you can select your first choice, your second choice, and so forth.

You could imagine that a voter might want to give two candidates the same ranking. For example, using the ballot example here, a voter might want to rank both Wonder Woman and Superman first and rank Black Panther second.

Our user interface does not allow voters to specify equal rankings like this. We occasionally get asked to allow equal rankings in OpaVote, and in this blog post we explain why we won't do so. The fundamental reason is a simple cost-benefit tradeoff.

Benefits of Equal Rankings

The benefit of allowing equal rankings is that the voter has increased ability to express his or her preferences about the candidates.