An online voting system is a software platform that allows groups to securely conduct votes and elections. High-quality online voting systems balance ballot security, accessibility, and the overall requirements of an organization's voting event.
At their core, online voting systems protect the integrity of your vote by preventing voters from being able to vote multiple times. As a digital platform, they eliminate the need to gather in-person, cast votes using paper, or by any other means (e.g. email, insecure survey software).
You may hear an online voting system being referred to as an online election system, an online e voting system, or electronic voting. These all make reference to the same thing: a secure voting tool that allows your group to collect input from your group and closely scrutinize the results in real time.
Keep reading for access to the most comprehensive online voting system introduction you will find.
This includes electing:
This includes, for example, voting on:
Online voting tools and online election voting systems help you make important decisions by gathering the input of your group in a way that’s systematic and verifiable.
Oftentimes, these decisions are made on a yearly basis - during an event (e.g. your organization’s AGM) or at a particular time of the year. Or you might run ongoing polls amongst your group (e.g. anonymous employee feedback surveys).
It’s a good idea to use an online voting system to:
In all of these cases, an online voting system will enable better decisions, justify those decisions, and let you share proof that these decisions were carried out in line with the standards of your group.
Using an online voting tool will generate confidence in the results of your votes and elections, lower your voting-related costs, and streamline the election process for both you and your voters.
The cost savings and efficiencies you’ll gain are unparalleled to any other method of voting. Groups switching to web-based online voting systems from more expensive and less efficient voting technologies like voting machines, paper ballots, and in-person meetings will reap these benefits without increasing risk.
Needing to fly halfway around the world to vote at your organization’s annual meeting is an example of a vote with low accessibility. On the other hand, tapping a link on your mobile device that securely logs you into the online voting system website is an example of a vote or election with high accessibility.
High accessibility generates greater turnout rates among your group.
With an online voting system, you can easily showcase election results to eliminate concern. Sharing all administrator activity during your election to prove no one went in altered the results is just one of the many trust-building tactics you’ll be able to use in light of a vote challenge.
The confidence in your voting and election results is by far the most valuable aspect that online voting systems will offer to your group. The fallout of a vote being perceived as unfair is expensive, time-consuming, and wrecks havoc on the hard-earned trust you’ve built among group members. From this perspective, an online voting system offers unparalleled election security.
The best online voting systems are flexible enough to help a variety of organization types. Here are some examples of groups that use online voting systems to run their votes and elections:
A high-quality online voting system or online election system will offer these core capabilities:
There are wonderful survey tools out there. Google Forms and Typeform (or even a Slack poll ) are great examples of tools to use when you just need some quick input from your group.
Polling and survey tools aren’t always a good replacement for an online voting system, however. What type of tool you choose depends on your usage and needs.
Consider this: How important the vote is to your group? And what would happen if there was a challenge to your vote; how would your group leadership handle it?
In certain, basic scenarios polls and survey creators are the best thing to use among small groups of people where the outcome doesn’t matter that much. For example, no one’s going to be upset if someone unfairly voted twice about where to go for lunch. (Or, at least we hope that’s the case!)
In more widely impactful scenarios, using these free and cheap survey tools can absolutely wreak havoc on your organization. Take a leadership election for example: a number of critical items are at stake: salaries, prominence, egos. It’s not hard to imagine how things could spiral if someone feels unfairly slighted.
Our advice? Carefully consider the ramifications when selecting the right tool for the job.
We recommend you select a web app based online voting system that you and your voters can securely access from any modern web browser (e.g. Google Chrome, Safari, Microsoft Edge, Firefox).
What are web apps? Web apps are web-based applications that don’t need to be installed on your mobile device or computer. Instead, they’ll run completely from your web browser. Native apps, in contrast, need to be downloaded onto your device from a website or an app store.
There are various reasons why we suggest you choose a web app based online voting system as opposed to an application that you and your voters will need to download onto their device.
By using a web app based online voting system website, you (and your voters) will get access to these benefits:
Your voters will be able to instantly access the voting system online, without needing to go to the App Store (or Google Play store, or a company’s website) to download an app onto their device. Accessibility is directly connected to greater voter turnout and participation.
High-quality, well-built web apps are routinely used and trusted by small businesses and the enterprise alike. Both the login information and the data you upload to the app will be safely stored in a cloud-based environment.
The online voting website will look and function the same no matter what device you and your voters use. This is not always the case with apps that need to be downloaded.
In brief, use an online voting platform that you can access from a browser. And don’t make your voters download an app.
A botched election will erode trust within your group. In most cases, this mistrust will be directed toward their leadership, the organization, and its systems and processes. It’s not hard to see how this isn’t a solid foundation for the growth and continued success of your group.
Here’s an example: Let’s say you ran a vote last week and by all accounts, it was successful. New leadership was elected, or maybe you updated a set of important rules. Great!
This week, however, you get an email that informs you someone in your group not only disagrees with that decision, they want to formally challenge the outcome. They allege voter fraud. And now they’re getting more and more people in your group on board with their thinking.
You can hope this doesn’t happen, but it is a common occurrence and you should plan for it.
Without a high-quality online voting system, you wouldn’t have access to verifiable proof that the vote wasn’t unfairly manipulated. Best case, you would need to spend many stressful hours getting those items together to prove your case.
If you want your group to trust one another in spite of certain individuals not agreeing with major decisions, an online voting system is the only mechanism that will help you maintain trust by justifying how you came to those decisions. It’s the only technology you can use to prove to your group that the vote they participated in wasn’t unfairly manipulated.
