In this blog post, we highlight the great work of Impact 100 of Northwest Florida, and describe how they used OpaVote to allow voting at their meeting both on smart phones and using election kiosks.

The mission of IMPACT 100 of Northwest Florida is to financially support nonprofit organizations in Northwest Florida by empowering women as philanthropists and leaders, by bridging the geographic areas of the region, and by leveraging the talents of women to be a positive force for good in our communities.

IMPACT 100 is an amazing group. The group has 514 women as members and each member contributes $1000 per year. All of the money goes to supporting nonprofits so the group was able to make awards totaling $514,000! IMPACT 100 used OpaVote to select five nonprofits as award winners from nine candidate organizations. The worthy winners this year were Sinfonia (music education for schools), Youth Village (after-school programs for children), One Hopeful Place (homeless shelters), Oasis (AIDS support), and Gulfarium (rehabilitation of rescued sea turtles).

The election took place during their annual meeting where each organization described its mission, and after the presentations, the members would vote to choose the winners. To make the voting as easy possible, the organizers wanted to allow two ways of voting:

1. Send an email to voters to allow them to vote on their smart phones, or
2. Allow voters to vote at voting kiosks (e.g., an iPad set up to present the voting page).

They didn't know ahead of time how each voter would prefer to vote so they had to be ready to allow each voter to vote on their smart phone or at a kiosk but not both! Fortunately, this is very easy to do with OpaVote.

1. A voting link was sent to the email address of each voter so that each voter could vote on their smart phone.
2. Voters who wanted to vote at a kiosk instead of on their smart phone would go to a table set up for voting administration.
3. The election administrators would then disable the email address of the voter so that it could not be used for voting. In its place, the voter was handed a secret voting code to be used at a voting kiosk.
4. The voter would then go the the voting kiosk, enter the secret code, and then enter her vote.

Mary Blackwell, the election manager, said that the whole process was a great experience, and they are looking forward to using OpaVote again for their 2019 election!

Some single transferable vote (STV) elections use what is called above-the-line (ATL) voting or a group voting ticket. ATL voting is most common in Australia where STV elections sometimes have a large number of candidates and voters are required to rank a certain number of candidates in order to cast a valid ballot.

To reduce the burden on voters, the voters have an option to allow their favorite party to choose the rankings for them. This post explains how you can implement an ATL online election with OpaVote.

Above, is an example of a ballot that includes an ATL option. The thick black horizontal line there is the "line" of above the line. A voter can vote above the line (ATL) or below the line (BTL) but not both (I suppose some implementations may allow both but I'll skip that to simplify the discussion).

An ATL vote is to select a party of the four parties competing in the election. If a voter picks a party, then the voter's vote is determined by the party's "ticket". Before the election, each party specifies its ticket, which corresponds to a ranking of the candidates competing in the election. Each party presumably ranks it own candidates the highest and followed by candidates of ideologically similar parties.

A BTL vote allows the voter to rank the candidates any way he or she wants.

ATL Elections with OpaVote

We'll explain how to implement an ATL election with OpaVote. It requires some manual processing of ballots, but in most ATL elections, a large percentage of voters vote ATL and this greatly simplifies the manual processing.

First, create an OpaVote election with two Contests. The first contest is for ATL voting. You list each party as a candidate and select the checkbox voting, single winner voting method. The second contest is for BTL voting. You list each candidate and select your preferred ranked voting method.

Second, run the election and collect all of the votes. For now, I will presume that all voters complied with your voting instructions and voted either ATL or BTL but not both. At the end of the election, you will have results for each of the ATL contest and the BTL contest, but these are not the final results, because you need to merge them together.

Third, create an OpaVote Count for properly merging the ATL votes and the BTL votes. There are a few steps to do this:

1. Enter a weighted vote for each party's ticket. For example, suppose 143 voters cast an ATL vote for party A's ticket. You enter a single ballot with the candidate order for party A and assign it a weight of 143. Repeat this for the other parties.
2. Enter each of the BTL votes (with a weight of 1). Here, you are just reentering the votes from the election. The percentage of BTL votes is usually small (a few percent) so this operation isn't too tedious.
3. Count the votes to get the final winners.

For many years, we've allowed customers to make payments to OpaVote using a credit card via Stripe or via PayPal.  Because PayPal is such a difficult company to work with, we've decided to stop accepting payments via PayPal.  Stripe supports payments in more than 135 countries so this should be a good solution for nearly all OpaVote customers.

I suspect some customers will find it a hardship to no longer be able to make payments via PayPal.  If that is the case for you, please contact us, and let us know what payment options (besides PayPal) are available to you, and we'll do our best to make it work.

Thank you for your understanding!

For most elections, the anonymity of the vote is extremely important, and OpaVote makes sure that no one (not even us!) can figure out how a voter votes. For some elections, however, it is required that the vote not be anonymous or that the votes of voters are recorded so it is known how each voter voted.

Recorded votes are commonly used for elections of elected bodies. For example, for most countries, the votes of elected representatives (e.g., Senators and members of the House of Representatives) are recorded so that the people who voted for them know what they are doing.

Any organization that elects people to represent its members might want to use recorded voting. For example, if you live in a condominium association and elect trustees to represent the condo owners, then you likely want to use recorded voting when the trustees vote on behalf the condo owners (though you would probably use anonymous voting when the condo owners elect the trustees).

Running an election with recorded voting with OpaVote is very simple. There is a new option (only available in expert mode) that allows you to set "Anonymous voting" to "no". When you do this, we record the votes of each voter.

To see the recorded votes after the election is over, download the spreadsheet of all voter statistics from the election console. A new column is added for each contest in the election, and the new columns show the votes for each voter.

The recorded votes only available to the election manager. The manager can, of course, share the voter statistics spreadsheet with others to let them know how the voters voted.

For an election manager, one of the hardest parts of running an election is getting the voters to actually vote! We have a previous blog post that gives some advice for increasing election turnout, but which elections are the most successful in getting voters to turn out and vote?

Without a doubt, it is high school elections!!! The graph here shows our usage for the last 4 days, and the peak there is a high school election. Many elections have turnout in the 10-25% range, but for high school elections it is usually in the 50-90% range.

Why is that? We posit a couple reasons...

First, the voters tend to know all of the candidates really well and thus don't need to do any research to know who they want to vote for. By contrast, yesterday, I voted in the primary election for Massachusetts, and I had to do quite a bit of work to identify all the offices I was able to vote for, who the candidates were, and finally what they stood for.

Takeaway: Make it super easy for the voters to understand who they are voting for. Create a web page to allow voters to get all of the information about all of the candidates. For smaller elections, you can include this in OpaVote voter emails and on the voting page, but for larger elections, we recommend you use a separate web page.

Second, the voters really care about the outcome. The class president and homecoming king/queen are important events in a high school student's life. While some of the offices I voted for yesterday were important (our Senator and Congressperson), others, in my view, shouldn't be things that we vote for. Why do we need an election for our county register of deeds?

Takeaway: Only have elections for important positions. Having a large number offices to fill (especially where many are unopposed) creates fatigue and apathy among the voters. Reducing the number of offices to vote for will increase your turnout.

In sum, if you want to increase your turnout, try to think like a high school student.

XKCD 2030