For our online elections and polls, we have an election duration that indicates how long your election is available on the OpaVote website. On our management console, we present an expiration date so that you know exactly when your election is no longer available.

We’ve never been completely happy with how we have implemented these durations, and we are tweaking it a bit to hopefully make it better and less confusing for our customers.

OpaVote specializes in online elections with ranked-choice voting. With ranked-choice voting, you can select your first choice, your second choice, and so forth.

You could imagine that a voter might want to give two candidates the same ranking. For example, using the ballot example here, a voter might want to rank both Wonder Woman and Superman first and rank Black Panther second.

Our user interface does not allow voters to specify equal rankings like this. We occasionally get asked to allow equal rankings in OpaVote, and in this blog post we explain why we won’t do so. The fundamental reason is a simple cost-benefit tradeoff.

Online elections don’t always go according to plan… For example, during an election, it is possible that a candidate may decide that she is no longer able or no longer willing to assume the duties of the position being elected. We describe this as a candidate “withdrawing” from the election. In this post, we explain how  to handle withdrawn candidates with OpaVote.

At OpaVote online voting, we already had code voters and weighted voters, but now we have weighted code voters! This feature will be especially useful for HOA and condo elections where a voter’s weight corresponds to the size of his or her share of the common condominium expenses.

I’ll first review code voters and weighted voters, and I’ll then explain how to put the two together.

Some online elections at OpaVote have a very large number of candidates. We’ll sometimes see a single contest with hundreds of candidates or many contests where each contest has a large number of candidates.

An OpaVote manager recently asked me the best way to run an election with a large number of candidates. The best answer is don’t run an election with a large number of candidates! In some instances, it may be unavoidable, but as an election manager, you should work hard to have a reasonable number of candidates.

In this blog post, we explain (1) why should not have a large number of candidates and (2) if you do, how to improve the process.

It is quite rare for me to be against any kind of voting reform. After all, I started OpaVote for the primary purpose of promoting ranked-choice voting. But when it comes to the supposed reform of lowering the voting age from the current standard of age 18 to something lower, I am dead set against it.

Here is my reasoning in a nutshell: I don’t see lowering the voting age as having any significant impact in improving voter turnout. To the extent that people or organizations advocate for lowering the voting age, they are distracting us from real reforms that could make a difference.

Our largest election ever was completed yesterday with a total of 57,000 voters. Although we’ve carefully designed our online voting platform to scale to handle elections of any size, we must admit that we do get a little nervous when a customer has an election that goes where no election has gone before!