In our previous post, we provided our recommendations for the best voting methods to use when electing a single person.  In this follow-up post, we give our recommendations for electing a group of people.

OpaVote in December 2014

It has been a tremendous year at OpaVote!  We have been constantly adding new features and improving existing features to provide you with the best experience possible for running your elections.

OpaVote offers 23 different counting methods that you can use for counting the votes in your election!  Most other election providers give you just one option.  Here, we help you navigate the options for electing a single person (president, vice-president, treasurer, etc.) We’ll have a follow up post to discuss electing a group of people (committees, councils, etc.).

Most people use OpaVote for conducting elections over email, but it is actually very easy to use OpaVote to conduct on-site elections where people vote in person at a voting booth or kiosk.  One of our customers did this, and shared the details with us so we are sharing with you in case you find it helpful for running your own on-site election.

Some OpaVote users use a “None of the Above” (NOTA) option when voting to fill an office.  Others call this a “Seek Further Candidates” (SFC) option, a “Reopen Nominations” (RON) option, or an “All Candidates Suck” (ACS) option.  The reason for a NOTA/SFC/RON/ACS option (hereinafter “NOTA”) is to allow the voters to decide that none of the candidates are worthy of being elected and that the organization is better off leaving the position vacant for the present time.

In my opinion, organizations are better off not using a NOTA option.  I’ll explain my reasoning here. But if you insist on using a NOTA option, you need to make sure you do so correctly and I’ll also explain how to do that.

We have just set up a blog to make it easier for us to share information with you to help you run your elections with OpaVote.  Here, we will have longer posts than what you will find on other social media sites, such as our Facebook, Twitter, and Google+ pages.