Executive Summary

The Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) is a non-profit political organization with over 200 chapters and over 100,000 members spread out all over the country. As an organization that is dedicated to democratic principles and practices, they need an election platform that supports their need for frequent, varied elections conducted online.

This is why the DSA and its chapters have used OpaVote almost exclusively for the past eight years. With OpaVote, they are able to operate their organization under the same democratic principles they fight for everywhere else.

OpaVote makes democratic decision making possible for organizations and communities of all shapes and sizes. Sometimes, an organization needs multiple people to manage their polls and elections.

We’re grateful to the hundreds of folks who have written in over the last year. We love that OpaVote has helped y’all make positive changes in your organizations and the world.

Since our last message, we’ve been living our values to move slow and shape things rather than move fast and break things. We’re making OpaVote more reliable, more sustainable, more accessible, and easier to use. Read on for some of our service improvements!

OpaVote’s free tier is perfect for small elections, as well as preparing to run bigger ones on our online election platform. But the long-standing 2-week data retention policy was causing confusion and creating an unnecessary sense of urgency.

Now free-tier elections get the same 10 weeks of data retention that paid clients receive. If you still want more time, every election has the option to extend data retention by a year for $40.

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. 

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.

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.