Whether it’s to decide the flavor of ice cream to serve at the church social or decisions of international import, election time is always exciting! Seeing people line up for the polls or eagerly awaiting ballots by mail, counting the votes and finally announcing the winners. But elections are also nerve-wracking for those who run them. Keeping track of the ballots, ensuring voters have access to information, and keeping returned ballots safe until counting makes voting day a long one for election staff. If your organization has a small staff, OpaVote’s voting software make voting day a breeze while losing none of the excitement.

Electoral reform is near and dear to my heart, and I started OpaVote to help promote betting voting methods, such as instant runoff voting and the single transferable vote.  There are many other important electoral reforms, and some are more important than better voting methods.

Below I present a U.S.-focused list of electoral reforms roughly in order of the importance that I place on them.  Others will certainly have strong disagreements, and I’d love to hear from you.  I’ll update this post over time with additional explanations for the other electoral reforms.

As people become increasingly less willing to go somewhere to vote, condo associations and HOAs, high schools, universities and colleges, and nonprofits are looking for the right online voting tool to increase voter turnout. From cost to convenience, there are a number of reasons to switch to online voting. 

OpaVote in May 2016

It has been another great year at OpaVote, and we have been working hard to continue to make it work better for you and to introduce new features.

We hired a web designer to completely redesign the home page.  We love the new design and think it is much better than the old design that you can see here.

Below are list some of the more significant improvements that we introduced over the past year.  Please let us know what you would like to see in 2017!

At OpaVote, we want both election managers and voters to have confidence in the integrity of the election outcome.  Election integrity is important for all types of elections, such as condo or HOA elections, high school elections, university or college elections, or nonprofit elections.

There are two main ways that election integrity could be compromised:

• The election manager could manipulate the election.
• Hackers could manipulate the election.

We’ll address both of these in this blog post.

Scottish STV is a great method to use for electing a group of people. To help you and your voters understand how it works, we give a “plain English” explanation of how votes are counted with Scottish STV.

If you’d like to see additional details, you are welcome to review the statute passed by Scotland.

San Francisco is in the process of counting the ranked-choice voting ballots for its city elections.  To make it easier to visualize the results, we have also processed the ballots with OpaVote and are sharing our results.  You can see an example bar chart here, and click the links below for full results.