2017 Year in Review

Happy New Year from OpaVote! We are based in the Boston area, which means that winter has arrived and our local yeti is roaming the streets! I don't know if he supports ranked-choice voting, but I'll try and find out.

We'll use this end of the year round up to give you an overview of all the accomplishments over the past year.

New Arrivals in 2017

• We had our largest election ever with more than 41,000 voters. To be honest, we were a little nervous, but it went off beautifully. Since we run on Google and Sendgrid servers, they were easily able to scale up to handle this larger election.
• We completely revamped our management console to make it easier to use. One cool feature is that we show you a preview of how the election page will look right in the console.
• We now support voting pages in Spanish, Portuguese, and French (though management are only in English).
• We implemented a backup email delivery system so that we can make sure as many voters as possible will receive their voting emails.
• We send more emails to election managers to keep them up to date on their elections. We send you an email to notify you when you can send reminders to voters, we send you an email when your election has ended, and we send an email with election results so you can archive them for as long as you need.
• Managers can now create a password account with OpaVote instead of logging in with another account (e.g., Google or Facebook).
• We launched a new portal at www.kwikvote.com to make it really easy for people to run free ranked-choice voting polls. 
• We did a thorough security audit to make sure that your can confidently run your elections worry free. See this blog post describing our security practices and also this one comparing us to our competitors.
• We now have an online chat widget so you can get quick answers to your questions. We do need to sleep, but you can get live support during our business hours.

Donations by OpaVote

We continue to support election reform and we have donated to the following causes in 2017:

• Fair Vote USA
• Fair Vote Canada
• Electoral Reform Society
• American Civil Liberties Union
• Fair Vote Minnesota
• Voter Choice Massachusetts (They are trying to enact RCV in my own state!)

Please consider these organizations in making your own charitable contributions.

That is our wrap up for 2017, and we are looking forward to a great 2018!