At OpaVote, we want voters to have confidence in the outcome of the election. Especially for hotly contested elections, there may be allegations of fraud or other bad acts to improperly influence the election.

The ability of voters to verify that the election was conducted properly can be referred to as election transparency.  The two main questions in election transparency are:

1. Were the ballots collected correctly (e.g., were ballots modified or discarded)?
2. Were the ballot counted correctly?

Were the ballots collected correctly?

To help with the first question, an organization should use an independent third party, such as OpaVote, for conducting elections.  When an election is conducted by the organization itself, voters will be more suspicious that the people conducting the election may have interfered to assist their preferred candidates.

Because ballots are collected anonymously, it is difficult to prove that they were collected correctly. To alleviate concerns, OpaVote provides detailed information about the voting process. In addition to making sure that each voter can vote only once, OpaVote stores the date and time that each ballot was cast and the IP address of the computer that was used. This information can be used to increase confidence that the ballots were collected correctly.

Were the ballots counted correctly?

To provide transparency in the ballot counting process, OpaVote has always provided the ballots to voters so that they can independently count them and verify that they were counted correctly.

Counting ranked-choice ballots for larger elections is not an easy task, so voters may want to use software to do that.  If a voter were to download the ballots of an election and then count them with OpaVote, the voter would be asked to pay a fee to do so.  How annoying is that!!!

To alleviate this and promote ballot counting transparency, OpaVote now has a new feature.  Free recounts of ballots!

When you share election results with voters, they now have three options:

1. View the official results
2. Download the ballots
3. Recount the ballots using any of the counting methods supported by OpaVote.

We hope you and your voters like this new feature.

Voting is not an easy task for a voter.  I don't mean taking time off work, getting to the polls, and waiting in line, etc.  I mean, when you are standing there in the ballot box, you have to decide what vote you want to cast given the options presented to you.  For example, a Jill Stein supporter may be torn between supporting her favorite candidate and voting for a candidate who has a better chance of winning the election.  I'll refer to this as the cognitive burden of expressing your vote.

In this post, I'll address the cognitive burden of three different types of voting:

1. Plurality voting (i.e., selecting one candidate)
2. Approval Voting
3. Ranked-choice voting

OpaVote supports all three of these voting methods if you want to try them out yourself.

Plurality Voting

Approval Voting

Ranked-Choice Voting

Other Stuff...

OpaVote is a huge proponent of using better voting methods.  The point of voting is to represent the will of the voters, but the most commonly used voting method (plurality voting) often doesn't do that well.

Especially with online voting, it so easy to implement better voting methods, such as instant runoff voting, single transferable vote, Condorcet, or approval voting.  Many organizations support these kinds of voting reforms, and I'll keep an up to date list in this blog post.  Let me know if I missed a good organization.

Australia

• Proportional Representation Society of Australia

Canada

• Fair Vote Canada

United Kingdom

• Electoral Reform Society

United States

• Californians for Electoral Reform
• Fair Vote
• Fair Vote Minnesota

This is a guest post from Kevin Baas.  Kevin is a computer programmer from Milwaukee and he has been thinking deeply about the right way to implement STV elections.  His conclusions sharply disagree with long-standing practices for STV elections so it makes for a very interesting read!

I am still unsure if I personally agree with Kevin's conclusions, but his approach is very novel and worth sharing with others.  Kevin's post is very technical so put on your thinking caps and get ready to dive in.

Rethinking STV Fundamentals

Three errors have plagued the counting of ranked choice ballots for over a century, and here’s how to fix them.

 While learning about how ranked choice ballots are traditionally counted, I discovered three critical flaws in the way everyone does it -- indeed, the way everyone has been doing it for over a century. I would like to share with you how I discovered these flaws and how to fix them. In the end I will outline a new and complete method for counting ranked choice ballots that contains none of these flaws, and consequently produces fairer results than any other system. (With the possible exception of CPO-STV, which it might be tied with.) In addition to explaining the reasoning for these changes, I will provide evidence to support my (admittedly bold) claim that the results are more fair.

Firstly let me outline two of the flaws by walking through two hypothetical scenarios.

On passing two tests. 

Failing Test 1

Consider the scenario (from http://www.accuratedemocracy.com/e_shares.htm ):

A ranked-choice election to fill 3 seats. The candidates are A, B, R, and S and 36 ballots are cast. 

Many OpaVote elections depend on the delivery of voting emails to voters. Delivering large quantities of email is a tricky business because, as you all know, emails are unfortunately abused by spammers.

As an election manager, it is very important for you to know the status of email delivery for your election. OpaVote now makes it very easy to do this!

Above, is a portion of the management console for an election that shows email delivery status.  For this election, there are 2782 email voters.  Each email sent to a voter can be in one of four states: pending, in transit, rejected, or delivered.  We'll explain each of these.

Pending Emails

OpaVote sends emails out at a rate of 2 per second.  This helps ensure that receiving mail servers accept the emails.  If OpaVote suddenly sends thousands of emails to a single mail server, the mail server may assume they are spam and drop them in the digital trashcan.

While voter emails are waiting to be sent out they will be in the pending state.  Right after you start your election, all voter emails will be in the pending state.  If you refresh the management console, you will see this number go down at a rate of about 2 per second.

An email will change from the pending state to another state when we receive a response from the email server the voting email is being sent to, and then the voter email will transition to one of the states below.

In Transit Emails

Sometimes a receiving email server will play coy with an incoming email if it isn't sure who the sender of the email is.  The receiving email server will basically say, no one is home, please try again later.  The idea is that spam senders probably won't come back but legitimate email senders will try again.

OpaVote does try again, and while OpaVote is in the process of trying again, the voter email will be in the in transit state. The email will probably be delivered in the future, but we don't know yet for sure if it will.  It may take 24 hours for an in transit email to be delivered.

If all of your voters have email addresses at the same domain (e.g., myschool.com) and most or all of the voters are in the in transit state, then you should contact your IT department and ask them to whitelist opavote.com as a sending domain.  If your IT department wants other information, such as our sending IP addresses, please contact us.

Rejected Emails

For voter emails that are not delivered or where it seems the voter does not want to receive the emails, the voter email is put in the rejected state (note that some of these emails have been delivered but are not included in the delivered state below).  Fewer than 2% of your emails should be in the rejected state.  If many of your emails are rejected, we may terminate your election.

An email bounces if it cannot be delivered.  This could be caused by a typo in the email address, because the person closed that email account, because the person's inbox is full, or for a variety of other reasons.  If you click on the rejected emails link, you will see the response that we received from the email server.  Although the responses are somewhat cryptic, most of the time they make sense.

Voters can mark emails as spam, and often the mail server will tell us that the voter marked the email as spam.  When this happens, we put the voter on a blacklist and we never send emails to them again.  A voting email will be in this category if they previously marked a voting email as spam (from your previous election or someone else's) or marked a voting email from the current election as spam.

Voters can opt out of OpaVote emails.  They have the choice to opt out of emails for the particular election or for all OpaVote elections.  Voters who opt out are put in the rejected category, though it is really sort a gray area.  Some voters may vote and then opt out so they haven't really rejected the email...

Delivered Emails

The last category is delivered emails.  Nearly all of the time, this means the voting email reached the voter's inbox.  We can't be sure however.  All we really know is that the mail server told us that it accepted the email.  The email could have been put in the voter's spam folder or could have been lost on the receiving end.

So there you have it.  We hope you find this feature useful!

Some of our customers have a mixed election where most voters vote online via a link in a voting email but some voters vote via a postal ballot.  When you have such an election, you need to combine the online votes with the postal votes and then count the combined votes.  In this post, we explain how you can do that with OpaVote.  We provide two options, and you can pick which works best for you.

Election then Count

OpaVote provides three types of items: (1) an Election, (2) a Poll, and (3) a Count.  With this method, you will create an OpaVote Election for your online votes, and then create an OpaVote Count to combine the online ballots with the postal ballots (you won't use a Poll).

Create an OpaVote Election for all of your online voters.  See the OpaVote Help menu for more details about how to do this.  When the election is over, click the "Download Ballots" button to get the online ballots.  The default name of the file is "ballots.txt", but you should change this to a more descriptive name, such as "online-ballots.txt".  The ballot files are just plain text files that you can open in any text editor (you can also view them in the Chrome browser).  If you need help looking at the contents of a ballot file, contact your local tech guru.

Send paper ballots to your postal voters and get the completed postal ballots back.  We recommend numbering the received postal ballots to make it easier to audit the ballot entry process.

Now combine online ballots with the postal ballots.  We do this by creating an OpaVote Count.  Note that you may need to make a payment for each of your Election and your Count.  We recommend the following procedure:

First, in your Count, click the "Edit Ballots" button to bring up the ballot editor.  Then enter the postal ballots in the order that you numbered them.  Double check to make sure you entered them correctly!

Second, after you have finished entering the postal ballots, use the "Download" button to save the postal ballots.  Again, the default name is "ballots.txt" so you should rename it to a more descriptive name, such as "postal-ballots.txt".  You could skip this step, but we think it makes the auditing process easier.

Third, use the "Append Ballots" button to append the online ballots to the postal ballots.  After clicking the button, you simply select the file containing the online ballots.

Fourth, double check that you have done the above steps correctly.  If you make a mistake and need to redo it, then you will need to start over again (which may require another payment).

Fifth, select your desired counting method, and then count the votes.  If desired, you can share the link to the results with others.

I'll now go into a couple variations of the above process.  To make sure that you enter the postal votes correctly, you could have two different people do the first step, and make sure that the two ballot files are identical.  You'll need a local tech guru to help you determine if the two ballot files are identical.

If you have a lot of postal votes, you can take a divide and conquer approach.  For example, if you have 200 postal votes, you could split them up into 4 groups of 50 and have 4 people enter them in parallel.  You will then have four different files of postal ballots and one file of online ballots.  You can combine all 5 by repeatedly using the "Append Ballots" button.  (Note that Counts are free until you actually want to count the votes so there are no extra charges for having people enter ballots in parallel.)

Election with Code Voters

You have another option that is a little simpler than the above process, but may be harder to audit.

As above, create an OpaVote Election for your online voters.  When setting up your Election, include a "code voter" for each postal voter (see the Help if you need more details on this).  We recommend downloading the codes and adding them to a spreadsheet alongside the name of each each postal voter.

You now know have two options for entering votes for a postal voter.

First, for each postal voter, you can send them their code via post along with the website address of your election (something like https://www.opavote.com/vote/1234).  The postal voter could then go to that address, enter his or her code, and enter his or her vote.

Second, you can send a paper ballot to each postal voter, receive the paper ballot back, and then enter the postal ballot yourself using the assigned code.  You simply go the election website, enter the voter's code, and then enter the vote on behalf of the postal voter.  Note that you need to trust the person entering ballots this way not to cheat!  Because ballots are anonymous after they have been entered, there is no way to later determine whether the ballot was entered correctly.  For this reason, we prefer the Election then Count method above.

You could even mix the above two options.  You can allow a postal voter to enter the vote online or send it back via post.  Since a code can only be used once, there is no danger of the ballot being counted more than once.

Make sure that you keep the codes confidential!  Anyone with the codes can use them to enter votes.  If you put the codes in a public place, it is easy for someone to use them to cheat.

We are excited to announce a new feature in OpaVote to help managers understand what their voters are doing!
One of the hardest parts of running an election is getting voters to vote.  For many OpaVote elections, voter turnout is only 10-25%.  If you want to improve that turnout it is helpful to know what your voters are doing.

OpaVote is now tracking two new statistics of voters: (1) whether they opened the voting email, and (2) whether they visited the voting page.  We track these in a couple different ways:

• Opens -- The total number of times a voting email was opened.  If a single voter opens the email twice, then both of those are counted.
• Unique Opens -- The total number of voters who have opened the voting email.  If a single voter opens the email many times, this counts as only one unique open.
• Visits -- The total number of visits to a voting page (after clicking the voting link in the voting email).
• Unique Visits -- The total number of voters who have visited the voting page.
• Votes -- The total number of voters who have voted.  There is no need for unique votes since a voter can only vote once. :)