Friday December 29, 2017

OpaVote Security Practices

Abstract image of a key in a lock on the front of a cloud

Some OpaVote customers are nervous about the security of online elections. To reduce risk, OpaVote follows many security best practices, and in this post we explain some of them to reassure you that it is safe to run your elections with OpaVote.

Wednesday December 27, 2017

Ranked-Choice Voting with a Supermajority Requirement

Drawing of a balance with a large number of people outweighing a small number

Some elections require a supermajority to cause an action to happen. A supermajority means more than a majority, and the most common supermajority requirements are 2/3 or 3/4 of the voters.

In this post we explain how you can implement a supermajority requirement for your online elections with OpaVote.

Saturday December 2, 2017

OpaVote has the most Secure Elections

Silhouette of a padlock made from a cloud of security-related words

For important elections, you need to make sure that your online election provider has high security. With the recent news about the hacking of U.S. politicians and elections, you can’t be too paranoid.

We recently decided to do a security review, and we’d like to share our results with you.  In addition, we also did a security review for a few of our competitors.

Friday October 27, 2017

Increasing Voter Turnout in your Elections

Comic showing golfers in the rain discussing not voting because of bad weather

Getting voters to vote in your online elections can be a daunting task. Here, we’ll give you some tips for increasing your turnout.

Friday October 20, 2017

Guest Post: Free Voting Method and Bad Apple Sorts

Image of a group of apples with one rotten one

This is a guest post from Mike Sawyer who runs a blog at Dare to Ask! and who collaborates with Prof. Brian Zurowski of Davidson College.  Mike has some great ideas to promote ranked-choice voting and also how to allow voters to express more information about their preferences.

Thursday September 14, 2017

STV with Constraints

Image of a group of chains with a pink one

The single transferable vote (STV) is an amazing voting system because it naturally provides proportional representation. This means that the demographics or interests of the elected candidates will tend to match the demographics or interests of the voters.

Some organizations want to use STV for their online elections, but also want to require that the elected candidates meet a specified requirement. For example, an organization might want to require that half the elected candidates are women and half are men.

Sunday September 3, 2017

Customer Support at OpaVote

Close-up of a keyboard with a large red key labeled "help"

I’m using this blog post to expand on how you can get customer support for using OpaVote for online voting and our philosophy of customer support.