2016 Year in Review

OpaVote in May 2016

It has been another great year at OpaVote, and we have been working hard to continue to make it work better for you and to introduce new features.

We hired a web designer to completely redesign the home page.  We love the new design and think it is much better than the old design that you can see here.

Below are list some of the more significant improvements that we introduced over the past year.  Please let us know what you would like to see in 2017!

New Features in 2016

In 2016 we had more than 250 code checkins and 14 blog posts.  Here is a summary of the highlights of our improvements to OpaVote over the last year:

1. Tracking of voter activity in your election.  OpaVote shows you a graph with the number of email opens, the number of voting page visits, and the number of votes cast on an hourly basis.
2. Detailed reporting of email delivery.  OpaVote tells you when emails have been delivered to individual voters.  If emails bounce, OpaVote tells you why so you can try to fix it!

Why Switch to Online Voting?

As people become increasingly less willing to go somewhere to vote, condo associations and HOAs, high schools, universities and colleges, and nonprofits are looking for the right online voting tool to increase voter turnout. From cost to convenience, there are a number of reasons to switch to online voting. 

Cost

If you think that an online voting tool is cost prohibitive, then you will probably be surprised that it is not only less costly both for the tool and for your staff’s time. OpaVote gives you a relatively inexpensive but secure way of getting more people to participate in the voting process.

Secure

One of the major benefits of online voting is that you can ensure that the right people receive their ballots. They receive an email with a link that provides the necessary information. Security is not a concern as voting pages are encrypted. The encryption helps to make people feel that their vote is safe from tampering.

Easy User Interface

With a user interface that is easier to use than the traditional lever, you don’t have to worry that a person will cast their ballot other than how they intended. The system displays their choices as a confirmation before their ballot is recorded - if there's a correction needed, the voter can simply go back!

Convenience

If you need to increase voter turnout, there is no better way than OpaVote as your online voting tool. Your voters will have a way to vote from anywhere, at any time!

Ensuring Election Integrity

At OpaVote, we want both election managers and voters to have confidence in the integrity of the election outcome.  Election integrity is important for all types of elections, such as condo or HOA elections, high school elections, university or college elections, or nonprofit elections.

There are two main ways that election integrity could be compromised:

• The election manager could manipulate the election.
• Hackers could manipulate the election.

We'll address both of these in this blog post.

Election Manager

An election manger at OpaVote is responsible for all aspects of running the election.  The manger needs to provide the information about the election, candidates, voter lists, etc.  Although you hopefully trust your election manager, we do a few things at OpaVote to limit what a corrupt election manager could do.