Whether it’s a condo or HOA election, a high school election, a university or college election, or a nonprofit election, improving voter turnout is a central concern. High voter participation makes for better representation and greater civic engagement. Establishing more voting locations is a traditional method of making voting easier, but what if you could put a ballot box in every voter’s pocket?

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?

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 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.

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.

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.

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.