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.

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 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.

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

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.

Code Voters Recap

As a first step, we will explain what a code voter is at OpaVote. OpaVote has two types of voters (i) email voters and (ii) code voters.

With email voters, we send each voter an email message that has a secret link that allows them to vote and only vote once. You could use this during a Zoom meeting, but code voters are better because voters don't need to wait for the email to arrive, take the time to open their email account, etc.

With code voters, the election manager (likely you!) provides each voter with a secret code before the Zoom meeting. For example, you could email it to them. Instruct each voter to write the secret code on a sticky note and attach it to their computer screen for easy reference.

A voter will use this secret code to access a voting page like this:

Re-Using Codes Across Elections

If you are going to be voting on multiple things during a single Zoom meeting, then it is far more convenient if each voter can use the same secret code for all of the elections. Fortunately, this is easy to do with OpaVote. Here are the steps:

1. Create a "Template" Election on the OpaVote management console. Give it a title that makes it clear that it is a template and is not to be used for an election.
2. Add the desired number of codes to the template election.
3. Email each voter one code to be used during the Zoom meeting.

Each participant in the Zoom meeting can click on that link to get to the voting page, type in their secret voting code, and then vote. You can do this for as many real elections as you like.

We hope this makes it easier for you to run your Zoom elections during these otherwise difficult times.  Stay safe everyone!

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.

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!